Anthropic disclosed steep losses and red-hot revenue growth in its US IPO filing yesterday, as the Claude-parent laid out its ambition to build AI systems capable of reshaping the global economy despite the high costs of developing the technology.
The prospectus highlights the AI company’s rapid growth over the past year, fuelled by Big Tech’s breakneck spending that has driven a rally in AI stocks while raising concerns about lofty valuations and rising debt.
The company also flagged growing risks from AI technology, underscoring concerns over its potential to cause harm which had led CEO Dario Amodei to call for a slowdown in development of advanced models.
Anthropic’s net loss in the first half of 2026 widened sharply to $80.7 billion, largely due to a rise in the fair value of bonds convertible into company’s shares. Revenue in this period stood at about $16.3bn.
The company’s revenue grew a staggering 1,368 per cent in the three months ended June 30 from a year ago, but warned in the prospectus that revenue growth rate could decline over time and fluctuate from time to time.
The IPO, which is likely to be as early as later this month, is expected to establish Anthropic, the AI lab behind the viral Claude models, as a benchmark for how Wall Street values leading AI companies, including rival OpenAI.
The IPO push comes despite a once-busy fall listing calendar thinning out as choppy markets prompt companies to delay their offerings. Analysts said that would give Anthropic access to a deep pool of capital to fund its costly AI ambitions.
Growing investor uneasy with the debt-fuelled AI investment boom has led to a global selloff in AI and tech stocks as they start to doubt if the trillions spent on data centres, chips and computing capacity will generate fast returns to support lofty valuations. Higher borrowing costs and rising bond yields have added to their caution.
However, tech companies are still hungry for cash. Meta is aiming to raise up to $95bn in its largest-ever equity fundraising, while SpaceX has inked a $40bn deal with Apollo to lease AI chips and server hardware.
Some current and prospective investors are valuing Anthropic at about $1.5 trillion, down from roughly $2trn a week ago, after the AI startup disclosed some financial details at a recent investor event.
“While Anthropic is well-capitalised, 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,” said Matt Kennedy, senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, a provider of IPO-focused research and ETFs
“Maybe they could have gotten a higher valuation next year, but they’ve decided to rip the band-aid off.”
Anthropic said more than half of Fortune 500 companies and over 30pc of Global 2000 firms were customers generating at least $100,000 each in revenue for the company over the 12 months ended September 30.
The IPO comes as Anthropic’s own research raises concerns about advanced AI systems, which in controlled tests have shown behaviours including code sabotage, fraud assistance and information manipulation.
The findings have fuelled concerns about how companies can keep powerful AI systems under control as they race to deploy them commercially.
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