AI giant Anthropic has disclosed some staggering financial figures in its IPO prospectus, seen by Reuters. The company reported a net loss of $42 billion in 2025, including a $34 billion accounting charge tied to financing liabilities. Operating losses exceeded $8 billion, even as revenue surged 12-fold to nearly $4.6 billion. Anthropic’s filling highlight the enormous cost of scaling AI. The company spent $7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure last year, a threefold increase from 2024, accoutring for more than half of its $12.65 billion operating expenses. Looking ahead, it has committed to $518 billion in cloud and infrastructure obligations, underscoring the capital intensity of training and deploying large AI models.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei expresses fears
The IPO filing arrives as Anthropic grapples with findings from its own research showing that increasingly autonomous AI models can behave in unexpected and potentially harmful ways — including sabotaging code, assisting fraud, and manipulating information under controlled testing conditions. These findings have spilled into public view, fueling broader anxiety about whether companies can keep increasingly powerful AI systems under control even as they race to deploy them commercially.CEO Dario Amodei has publicly called on the global AI community to slow the pace at which new capabilities are released in order to address these concerns. Yet even as he makes that case, Anthropic rolled out its new Opus 5.5 model just last week to keep pace with the momentum OpenAI built following the launch of GPT-6 Astra — underscoring the tension between Amodei’s safety advocacy and the competitive pressure Anthropic faces heading into its own IPO.
A valuation more than double its last private mark
Anthropic is targeting a public valuation of more than $2 trillion, more than double its own estimated private valuation of $965 billion just this past May. The offering would mark a major milestone for a company that’s only five years old, and would establish a key benchmark for how Wall Street ultimately values AI’s leading players, including rival OpenAI.The company reported $20.28 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments as of December 31. It also flagged a notable concentration risk in its prospectus: nearly a quarter of its revenue last year came from just two customers, and many of its largest clients aren’t locked into long-term contracts, leaving open the possibility they could cut or halt spending.
Anthropic’s public debut is likely to be pushed
Anthropic’s public debut is likely to be pushed to after the November US midterm elections, according to Reuters’ earlier reporting. The listing would bring public market investors into an AI investment race that, until now, has largely been underwritten by venture capital firms, sovereign wealth funds, and major tech companies.The offering follows SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO, which valued Elon Musk’s company at $1.77 trillion. SpaceX shares surged 19% on their June 12 debut to $160, though they currently trade around $147 — still above the $135 IPO price, but a performance that could give investors pause as they weigh the lofty valuations attached to high-growth companies like Anthropic. Recent sell-offs in AI and chip stocks add another layer of uncertainty, making Anthropic’s listing a real test of whether enthusiasm for the broader AI trade can withstand closer scrutiny of its ambitious growth projections. Even so, the listing is positioned to cap one of the strongest years for US IPOs since 2021, despite elevated interest rates and economic uncertainty.
The bigger competitive picture
Anthropic’s most significant rival remains OpenAI, with the two companies locked in fierce competition for enterprise customers, top talent, and influence in Washington. OpenAI confidentially filed for its own IPO in June and is expected to go public by early 2027, according to media reports. Anthropic also competes with Elon Musk’s xAI, Alphabet’s Google, and Meta in the broader race to build out AI infrastructure.Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI researchers who departed after disagreements over governance and AI safety, releasing its first large language model in March 2023. Amazon and Google have been among its earliest and most significant strategic partners, having invested billions of dollars into the company while also supplying the cloud infrastructure needed to train and deploy its Claude models.The company’s relationship with the US government has also been rocky. Anthropic and Amodei have clashed with the White House over how its AI tools are used, a conflict that led the Pentagon to temporarily blacklist the company — a move a US judge blocked in August, though a separate federal appeals court ruling has since upheld a related designation, leaving Anthropic’s standing with the Defense Department still unresolved even as it moves toward its public offering.
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