Anthropic files IPO, could be biggest ever
Anthropic is preparing to sell its shares to the public on the Nasdaq stock market.
The artificial intelligence company Anthropic filed papers on Monday for what could become the biggest initial public offering (IPO) ever. At the same time, one of its top leaders has warned that advanced AI could pose a serious threat to humanity's survival. The filing puts the San Francisco-based company on track to begin trading on Wall Street next month. Its IPO could be bigger than SpaceX's public stock offering in June, which raised a record $86 billion. Anthropic could also become a public company before OpenAI, its rival in the AI industry. Both companies are expected to have very large stock market debuts.
The filing comes weeks after CEO Dario Amodei wrote an essay arguing that the development of the most advanced AI models should be slowed down.
An IPO could give Anthropic a huge amount of money to help it grow faster. It is not yet clear how much money the company will raise, what its final value will be, or how much its shares will cost. Even if the estimates are on the lower end, the five-year-old startup would become one of the world's most valuable companies. The offering could also increase the wealth of Amodei and his sister, co-founder Daniela Amodei, by billions of dollars.
The 335-page filing showed that Anthropic's revenue is growing quickly, but the company has not yet started making a profit, like many other technology companies preparing to go public. Anthropic, which makes the Claude chatbot, reported a net loss of $80.7 billion in the first half of 2026. This was much higher than its loss of $13 billion during the same period a year earlier. Even with these losses, private investors valued Anthropic at $965 billion earlier this year. Reports suggest its value could rise to $1.5 trillion or even $2 trillion, but its final value has not yet been decided.
If Anthropic is valued at $1.5 trillion, it would rank among the world's most valuable publicly traded companies, alongside Tesla. Reports say the IPO could raise as much as $100 billion, beating the current record set by another company owned by Elon Musk, SpaceX, earlier this year. Anthropic also stressed in its filing that its AI could "behave in unintended, misaligned, or autonomous ways." The company warned that if its technology is developed without enough safety measures and supervision, it could "pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity, particularly if such systems were misused, replicated, weaponized, or allowed to operate with a high degree of autonomy."