In the brief span of five years, Anthropic has grown from a safety-minded AI research venture into a company approaching $100 billion in annualized revenue — a pace of ascent that compresses decades of ordinary commercial history into a single act. As the San Francisco firm prepares to go public in November, it stands at the threshold every transformative technology company must eventually cross: the moment private ambition meets public accountability. The question the market is beginning to ask is not whether AI is consequential, but whether the companies built upon it can endure the weight o