Amid a flood of AI news Monday, Anthropic board member Reed Hastings expressed his view that artificial intelligence will threaten many companies but not likely the human race.
Hastings, co-founder and former CEO of Netflix, joined the Claude maker’s board last year. In an appearance on the podcast On with Kara Swisher, Hastings addressed Anthropic and the broader AI landscape in addition to weighing in on his alma mater’s recent struggles.
Multiple former Anthropic and OpenAI staffers made news in recent weeks by warning that there is a greater than 10% chance of human extinction within the next decade. Researcher Jacob Coxon, who did a flurry of media appearances after his doomsday prediction went viral on social media, “is not the ideal messenger,” Hastings said, but the message still “resonates” with the public.
“We lived through a terrible era with nuclear weapons where we could have blown each other up and there were times when it was close and I don’t want to repeat it,” Hastings said. “I don’t want to just because we can, get through a 10% chance of nuclear holocaust, let’s not do that again. So let’s keep the odds way, way low about what it can do. But on the same lens, you can get a lot of attention by saying the world’s going to end tomorrow. We humans, we’re very focused on Armageddon.”
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently joined a chorus of top executives warning about the risk of harm from AI as it grows rapidly and becomes more sophisticated.
Anthropic, meanwhile, is looking to vault to the top ranks of companies by total valuation when it goes public, likely by mid-to-late-November. An prospectus it filed Monday with the SEC, summarizing operating results, business risks, strategic goals and other information in a 400-page overview for investors, laid out a number of financials. Revenue grew 14-fold in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period of 2025, reaching $16.3 billion. Due in large part to a one-time charge, the company reported a net loss of $80.7 billion.
The valuation of the company after the IPO on the Nasdaq, under the ticker symbol ANT, is in flux, but is estimated to be between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion.
Hastings sees “creative destruction” as far more of a risk than anything apocalytpic about humanity itself. “Companies are going to get very competitive,” he said. “Take Oracle. There’ll be an Oracle challenger that will use AI and build an incredible database or set of applications that will be much lower cost. And that’s the creative destruction. It’s going to speed up capitalism and give entrepreneurs … [a way to] compete with everybody.”
Along with the blitz of Anthropic coverage, there were also major announcements from Meta and Microsoft. The former said it intends to raise $95 billion in equity financing aimed at helping it push deeper into AI, while the latter tech giant said it was offering voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees as it shifts resources toward AI.
