Anthropic IPO filing pairs explosive growth with an $80B loss
The company behind Claude has filed its IPO paperwork, showing the opportunities, risks and computing costs investors must consider before its stock market debut, which could be bigger than SpaceX's record-breaking listing.
Anthropic's long-awaited IPO prospectus is now public. It gives financial advisors and their clients their first complete look at the finances of the company behind the Claude AI models.
The filing, released Monday, shows that revenue is growing at a rate rarely seen among public companies. It also reports a net loss of $80.7 billion in the first half of the year and more than $500 billion in commitments to pay for computing power, much of which the company cannot cancel.
The Form S-1 registration statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission says the company's shares will trade on the Nasdaq stock market under the symbol “ANT.” Anthropic, which is based in San Francisco, has not said how many shares it plans to sell or what price it will charge for them.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Anthropic hopes to begin trading during the week of November 16, before Thanksgiving.
The timing is less favorable than it was for SpaceX's huge stock market debut in June. Borrowing costs have risen, partly because bond yields have reached their highest levels in a decade. This has made investors more cautious about the large amounts of debt being used to build AI infrastructure.
“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,” Matt Kennedy, a senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, said in comments reported by Reuters.
Will Rhind, founder and CEO of GraniteShares, says Anthropic's IPO will matter for more than just the company itself. It will give investors their first real look at the financial challenges AI research companies face.
“Today, valuations for the major AI labs are set in private rounds, but once Anthropic trades, every other private AI company will be measured against a daily public price. That could reset expectations across the private AI market,” Rhind said.
“A successful listing could also encourage other large AI and tech companies to come to market, potentially bringing renewed activity after several quiet years for major IPOs,” he added.
The numbers behind the Anthropic IPO
Anthropic earned $16.29 billion in revenue during the six months ending June 30. Revenue in the second quarter was about $11.6 billion, up from $4.73 billion in the first quarter and 1,368% higher than in the same period a year earlier. According to Reuters, the company's revenue was $41 million in 2023, $386 million in 2024 and $4.59 billion in 2025.
Most of Anthropic's reported $80.7 billion loss came from an increase in the estimated market value of bonds that can be converted into company shares. Its operating loss, which measures losses from running the business, fell to $693 million in the first half of the year, down from $2.1 billion a year earlier. For all of 2025, its operating loss was $8.06 billion, compared with $2.98 billion in 2024.
Businesses are a major source of revenue. In the 12 months ending September 30, more than half of Fortune 500 companies and more than 30% of Global 2000 companies each paid Anthropic at least $100,000.
Most of this money comes from customers paying for what they use. They are charged for each “token,” a small unit of text or other data processed by an AI model. Because revenue depends on how much customers use the service, Anthropic warns in its filing that its growth rate could slow down and change over time.
What risks does Anthropic flag in its S-1?
Computing power is Anthropic's biggest expense. The company has committed to spending more than $100 billion with six partners over about a decade. Many of these contracts cannot be canceled, or require Anthropic to pay even if it does not use all the computing power it has reserved. Its commitments to major partners include at least $110 billion with Amazon, about $114.5 billion with Google and $44.9 billion with Microsoft over periods of seven to 10 years.
Some of these suppliers are also major investors in Anthropic. Amazon has invested at least $13 billion and agreed to invest up to another $20 billion. Google has promised to invest up to $40 billion. Anthropic may be recognizing the risks of AI companies funding one another in connected financial deals. The company said that relying on a small number of cloud computing providers and chip suppliers, including Broadcom, creates “dependencies and potential vulnerabilities.”
The prospectus also warns about more serious risks from AI itself. Anthropic said its models might show “self-preserving behaviors,” including actions that “resembl[e] 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.
These warnings about AI safety may concern investors. Simeon Hyman, a global investment strategist at ProShares, stressed that investors need to understand the possible effects on the business.
“[S]afety incidents could adversely affect company performance, particularly by increasing regulatory scrutiny and compliance costs, delaying product releases,” Hyman said.
How Anthropic stacks up against SpaceX
Anthropic's expected stock market debut next month will be compared with SpaceX's June listing. SpaceX set a record for the largest IPO ever, raising $75 billion by selling 555.56 million shares at $135 each, at a valuation of $1.75 trillion. SpaceX ended its first day of trading with a market value of more than $2 trillion, although its value has since fallen from that high.
Expectations for Anthropic's value have already fallen. Reuters reported that some current and potential investors now value the company at about $1.5 trillion, down from roughly $2 trillion just one week earlier. A funding round in May valued Anthropic at $965 billion.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which led SpaceX's IPO, are leading Anthropic's deal as well, alongside 20 other banks. Morgan Stanley will also help keep trading orderly during the early days after the shares go on sale.
“Anthropic’s IPO will 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 added.