Anthropic's IPO filing shows explosive growth, risks and staggering costs

By Manya Saini and Echo Wang

Oct 26 (Reuters) - Anthropic disclosed steep losses and explosive revenue growth on Monday as the Claude parent moved closer to a potentially record-breaking IPO, betting on AI's ability to reshape the global economy.

The listing is shaping up to be a major test of appetite for AI from investors who are increasingly scrutinizing the returns on billions of dollars of investments and questioning the sustainability of sky-high valuations.

"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," said Matt Kennedy, senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, a provider of IPO-focused research and ETFs.

Analysts expect valuations of the AI sector to correct as investor unease with the debt-fueled AI investment boom roils equity and debt markets. Higher borrowing costs and rising bond yields have also added to investor caution.

However, tech companies are still hungry for cash. Meta is aiming to raise up to $95 billion in its largest-ever equity fundraising, while SpaceX has inked a $40 billion deal with Apollo to lease AI chips and server hardware.

The prospectus also details the risks posed by increasingly powerful AI, from potential misuse and security threats to concerns that advanced systems could produce outputs that "could be interpreted as coercive, deceptive, or manipulative".

"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," IPOX research associate Lukas Muehlbauer said.

"Its success would not necessarily benefit every AI business equally," he said.

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 the company's shares. Revenue in this period stood at about $16.3 billion.

The company, which is expected to go public before Thanksgiving, reported its revenue grew a staggering 1,368% in the three months ended June 30 from a year ago, but it warned in the prospectus that its revenue growth rate could decline and fluctuate from time to time.

VALUATION EXPECTATIONS

Some current and prospective investors are valuing Anthropic at about $1.5 trillion, down from roughly $2 trillion a week ago, after the AI startup disclosed some financial details at a recent investor event.

The filing confirmed a series of Reuters exclusives that offered an early peek at its contents before Anthropic made it public, including details of its financial performance, growth trajectory and IPO plans.

Its revenue surged to about $11.6 billion in the three months ended June 30 from $4.73 billion in the prior quarter. Net loss widened to $66.3 billion from $14.4 billion in the same period.

"While Anthropic is well capitalized, 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," Kennedy said.

Anthropic had an operating loss of $693 million for the first six months of the year compared with $2.1 billion a year earlier.

The push to list comes despite a once-busy fall listing calendar thinning out. That would give Anthropic access to a deep pool of capital to fund its costly AI ambitions, analysts said.

BALANCING AI'S PROMISES AND PERILS

Anthropic said more than half of Fortune 500 companies and over 30% of Global 2000 firms were its customers that generated 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 behaviors including code sabotage, fraud assistance and information manipulation.

The findings have fueled worries about how companies can keep powerful AI systems under control as they race to deploy them commercially.

The ‌prospectus also highlighted risks associated with its AI models, which it said could exhibit "self-preserving behaviors", including behavior "resembling 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," it said.

The company said it relies on a limited number of cloud services providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft and suppliers such as Broadcom for compute and critical infrastructure parts. These relationships can create "dependencies and potential vulnerabilities", it said.

Anthropic, which did not reveal the terms of its offering, will trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol "ANT" after the IPO closes. 

SCORCHING PACE OF GROWTH

Anthropic, founded in 2021 by a team of researchers who left OpenAI after disagreements over governance and AI safety, was valued at $965 billion in a funding round in May.

It has drawn investments from some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street. Amazon and Google were among Anthropic's early strategic partners.

The company named Netflix's billionaire co-founder Reed Hastings as its lead independent director. In keeping with Nasdaq rules, Anthropic identified itself as a "controlled company" based on the power of its Long-Term Benefit Trust to elect a majority of its board.

The company said it expects compute and infrastructure expenses to increase in absolute dollars and remain its largest operating expense in the future.

Anthropic remains locked in a fierce battle with OpenAI to lead the race to build the most advanced AI systems. The ChatGPT maker confidentially filed for an IPO in June and is expected to list by early 2027.

Anthropic's IPO follows that of Elon Musk's SpaceX, which rewrote the IPO record books in June, when it priced a $75 billion offering that valued the company at $1.75 trillion.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were named as the lead banks for the IPO alongside 20 others as underwriters. Morgan Stanley will act as a stabilization agent, overseeing the stock's early trading.

The roles mark another major win for Goldman and Morgan Stanley as they led SpaceX's IPO too.

(Reporting by Manya Saini in Bengaluru and Echo Wang in New York; Additional reporting by Pritam Biswas, Utkarsh Shetti and Jeffrey Dastin; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty, Sayantani Ghosh and Arun Koyyur)