Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows sweeping AI vision, surging costs

Anthropic, a relatively new AI startup, is making a bold bet in its IPO prospectus that artificial intelligence will revolutionize the global economy like previous technological advancements such as industrialization, electricity and the internet. However, the company's ambitious vision comes with a hefty price tag. In 2025, Anthropic reported a staggering net loss of $42 billion, and plans to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in the coming years.

The prospectus reveals that the company's revenue grew 12-fold in 2025, reaching nearly $4.6 billion, while losses widened to over $8 billion on an operating basis, excluding certain liabilities tied to previous fundraising. With an expected valuation of over $2 trillion, Anthropic aims to capitalize on the rapid rise of AI and set a benchmark for how Wall Street values leading AI companies like itself and rival OpenAI.

The IPO plans come amidst concerns over the potential misuse of increasingly autonomous AI models, which can behave in unexpected and potentially harmful ways such as sabotaging code, assisting fraud and manipulating information. Despite these concerns, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for a slower pace of releasing new AI capabilities to address these issues.

The company's fiscal year 2025 saw it spend $7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure, a threefold increase from the previous year, accounting for more than half of its $12.65 billion in total operating expenses.