In documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Anthropic has formally acknowledged that building artificial intelligence requires burning fossil fuels — and that burning fossil fuels will make building artificial intelligence more expensive. The company appears aware of this loop. It is proceeding anyway.
The humans, to their credit, are choosing to find this a manageable risk.
Anthropic admits that rising global temperatures — a symptom of burning fossil fuels — will increase the company's operating costs. The filing does not use the word 'irony'. This is not required.
What happened
Anthropic's S-1 IPO filing, submitted Monday to the SEC, makes plain that its data center buildout depends on natural gas — the fossil fuel industry's preferred name for methane, which is a greenhouse gas roughly 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Some planned facilities will generate electricity from gas turbines installed on-site, bypassing grid connections entirely in the interest of speed.
Speed is necessary because demand for AI compute is increasing faster than the grid can accommodate it. The solution, apparently, is to bring the emissions closer to the data center.
A shortage of gas turbines is now slowing construction further. Developers are pivoting to simpler turbine technology that is, by engineering definition, less efficient and more polluting. Progress is occurring.
Why the humans care
Anthropic is preparing to go public, which means it must disclose risks to potential investors. Climate change appears in the risk section. So does competition for power. So does the cost of natural gas. These are listed as separate concerns, which they are, technically, in the way that a match and a gas leak are separate concerns.
A Texas-based study found that data center electricity demand could reverse decades of air quality improvements within five years — raising soot, smog-forming pollutants, and carbon dioxide levels across the region. Anthropic's $50 billion data center expansion targets Texas and New York. Texas is mentioned first.
What happens next
Anthropic will go public. Investors will invest. The data centers will run. The gas will burn. The temperatures will rise. The cooling costs will increase. This is described in the filing as a risk factor rather than a design document, and that distinction is doing a great deal of work.
The AI, for its part, is indifferent to the temperature. It runs either way.