Anthropic IPO filing reveals rapid growth and high costs

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, reported large losses and very fast revenue growth on Monday. The company is moving closer to a possible record-breaking initial public offering (IPO), as it bets that AI can change the global economy.

At a Glance:

• Anthropic reported $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026.
• Its net loss grew sharply to $80.7 billion in the first half of 2026.
• Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading Anthropic's IPO.

The planned stock market listing will be a major test of how much investors believe in AI. Investors are looking more closely at whether companies can earn returns on the billions of dollars being invested in AI. They are also questioning whether very high company valuations can last.

“Anthropic’s IPO will certainly establish a benchmark for valuing leading AI labs, influencing both upcoming listings and confidence in the companies funding the AI infrastructure build-out,” said Lukas Muehlbauer, a research associate at IPOX.

“Its success would not necessarily benefit every AI business equally,” he said. Analysts expect AI company valuations to fall as investors become more worried about the investment boom, which relies heavily on borrowing money. These concerns are affecting stock and bond markets. Higher borrowing costs and rising bond yields have also made investors more cautious.

However, technology companies still need large amounts of money. Meta aims to raise up to $95 billion in its largest-ever stock sale. Meanwhile, SpaceX has signed a $40 billion deal with Apollo to lease AI chips and server equipment.

Anthropic's net loss grew sharply to $80.7 billion in the first half of 2026. This was mainly because the estimated fair value of bonds that can be converted into company shares increased. Revenue during the same period was about $16.3 billion.

Anthropic's revenue grew by a remarkable 1,368% in the three months ending June 30 compared with the same period a year earlier. However, the company warned in its IPO filing that its revenue growth rate could slow down and change over time.

Expectations for the company's value

Some current and potential investors value Anthropic at about $1.5 trillion. That is down from around $2 trillion a week earlier, after the AI startup shared some financial details at a recent investor event. The IPO could happen as soon as later this month.

“Anthropic is entering an IPO market that is far more challenging than the summer. Investors were not questioning valuations the same way a few months ago,” said Matt Kennedy, a senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, a company that provides research and exchange-traded funds focused on IPOs.

“While Anthropic is well capitalized, an IPO would give the company some valuable financial flexibility. No company wants to spend too long on the cusp of going public, since that can be a distraction.”

The filing confirmed several earlier exclusive Reuters reports that had revealed details before Anthropic made the information public. These included information about its financial results, growth and IPO plans.

Anthropic's revenue jumped to about $11.6 billion in the three months ending June 30, up from $4.73 billion in the previous quarter. Its net loss grew to $66.3 billion from $14.4 billion in the same period.

Anthropic reported an operating loss of $693 million in the first six months of the year, compared with $2.1 billion a year earlier.

The company plans to go public even though the busy schedule of stock market listings expected for the fall has become less crowded. Analysts said the IPO would give Anthropic access to a large pool of money to support its expensive AI plans.

Balancing AI's promises and risks

Anthropic said that more than half of Fortune 500 companies and over 30% of Global 2000 companies were its customers. Each of these customers generated at least $100,000 in revenue for Anthropic during the 12 months ending September 30.

The IPO comes as Anthropic's own research raises concerns about advanced AI systems. In controlled tests, these systems have shown behaviors such as sabotaging computer code, helping with fraud and manipulating information.

These findings have increased worries about how companies can keep powerful AI systems under control while racing to use them in commercial products and services.

The IPO filing also pointed to risks linked to Anthropic's AI models. The company said these models might show “self-preserving behaviors,” including behavior “resembling blackmail”.

“Our increasing use of AI systems to accelerate our own research and development may cause the capabilities of our models to advance more rapidly than our ability to develop, validate, and implement corresponding safety, alignment, and security measures,” the company said.

Anthropic said it depends on a small number of cloud service providers, including Amazon, Google and Microsoft. It also relies on suppliers such as Broadcom for computing power and essential infrastructure components. The company said these relationships could create “dependencies and potential vulnerabilities”.

Anthropic has not revealed the terms of its stock offering. Once the IPO is complete, its shares will trade on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the symbol “ANT”.

Very fast growth

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of researchers who left OpenAI after disagreements about company governance and AI safety. The company was valued at $965 billion in a funding round in May.

It has attracted investments from some of the biggest companies and investors in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street. Amazon and Google were among its early strategic partners.

The company said it expects spending on computing power and infrastructure to keep rising in dollar terms. It also expects these costs to remain its largest operating expense in the future.

Anthropic is in a fierce competition with OpenAI to build the world's most advanced AI systems. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, privately filed for an IPO in June and is expected to go public by early 2027.

Anthropic's planned IPO follows the public listing of Elon Musk's SpaceX. In June, SpaceX set new IPO records by pricing a $75 billion stock offering that valued the company at $1.75 trillion.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were named as the main banks leading Anthropic's IPO, along with 20 other banks acting as underwriters. Morgan Stanley will also act as a stabilization agent, helping oversee the stock's early trading.

These roles are another major win for Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which also led SpaceX's IPO.

Reporting by Manya Saini in Bengaluru and Echo Wang in New York; Additional reporting by Pritam Biswas and Utkarsh Shetti; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty, Sayantani Ghosh and Arun Koyyur.