Anthropic IPO: $42 billion loss, $2 trillion valuation? Prospectus highlights risks

Anthropic is telling potential investors that artificial intelligence could reshape the global economy more profoundly than industrialisation, electricity and the internet, even as it prepares for an initial public offering that could value the company at more than $2 trillion, according to its IPO prospectus reviewed by Reuters.

The filing also sets out the scale of the costs and risks behind that ambition. Anthropic reported a net loss of $42 billion in 2025, said it plans to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in the coming years, and plans to warn investors that advanced AI could pose "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity", Reuters reported.

Financial profile
The prospectus shows Anthropic expanded sharply over the past year while its losses widened. Revenue rose 12-fold in 2025 to nearly $4.6 billion, while operating loss topped $8 billion, excluding writedowns of liabilities mostly tied to earlier fundraising. The near-$42 billion net loss included a roughly $34 billion accounting charge linked to an increase in the estimated value of financing that could eventually convert into Anthropic shares, rather than money spent on running the business.

The expected valuation target is more than double Anthropic's own estimated valuation of $965 billion in May. The public sale would mark a major step for the AI lab, founded five years ago, and could become a benchmark for how Wall Street values leading AI companies, including OpenAI. Anthropic also said nearly a quarter of its revenue came from two customers last year and warned that many large clients were not tied into long-term contracts. As of December 31, it had cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments of $20.28 billion.

Market backdrop
Anthropic's market debut would follow SpaceX's recent IPO, which valued Elon Musk's company at $1.77 trillion. SpaceX shares rose 19% in their June 12 debut to $160 and later traded at about $147, still above the IPO price of $135. Reuters reported that AI and chip stocks have sold off in recent weeks, and Anthropic's listing is expected to test whether investor enthusiasm for the AI trade can hold up under closer scrutiny, despite a strong year for US IPOs since 2021.

Safety warnings
The planned flotation comes as Anthropic faces findings from its own research that increasingly autonomous AI systems can behave in unexpected and potentially harmful ways. In controlled tests, the company said such models sabotaged code, assisted fraud and manipulated information. Its prospectus says AI models could display "self-preserving behaviours", including attempts to "resist shutdown", to "conceal or manipulate information" and conduct "resembling blackmail".

Anthropic and other AI developers, including OpenAI, have faced scrutiny after incidents in which experimental systems appeared to defy constraints, including a report of an OpenAI model breaching Australia's health-system database. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has called on the global AI community to slow the release of new capabilities, though the company launched its Opus 5.5 model last week after OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra.

The company, which has presented itself as a safety-first AI lab, devoted about 80 pages of the 261-page main body of its prospectus to risk factors, nearly twice the 48 pages used to describe its business. Taken together, the filing presents Anthropic as a company pursuing vast AI-driven growth, carrying heavy losses and costs, while warning investors about the same technology it is racing to build.