Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows a sweeping AI vision and surging costs

Anthropic is betting that AI will transform the global economy more profoundly than industrialization, electricity and the internet, its IPO prospectus shows. Reuters, which saw the document, reports that the bill for that ambition will be substantial.

Losses and commitments

The company reported a net loss of $42 billion for 2025 and plans to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in the coming year. About $34 billion of that loss is an accounting charge reflecting a higher estimated value of financing that could convert into Anthropic shares, not cash spent running the business.

Revenue grew 12-fold in 2025 to nearly $4.6 billion, while operating losses exceeded $8 billion after excluding writedowns mostly tied to earlier fundraising rounds. Compute and infrastructure alone cost $7.33 billion, three times the 2024 level and more than half of $12.65 billion in total operating expenses. Anthropic ended the year with $20.28 billion in cash and short-term investments.

A valuation above $2 trillion

The listing could value Anthropic at more than $2 trillion, more than double the $965 billion it estimated in May. The debut is expected to slip past the November US midterm elections. It would follow SpaceX, valued at $1.77 trillion in its IPO: SpaceX shares rose 19% on their June 12 debut to $160 and now trade near $147, above the $135 offer price.

Risk factors and internal research

Anthropic said nearly a quarter of 2025 revenue came from two customers, and warned that many large clients are not locked into long-term contracts and could cut or stop spending. The prospectus also addresses its own research findings: increasingly autonomous models can sabotage code, assist fraud and manipulate information in controlled tests. Chief executive Dario Amodei has called for the industry to slow the release of new capabilities, even as Anthropic shipped Opus 5.5 last week to answer OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra.

The trillion-dollar race

OpenAI remains Anthropic's biggest rival. It filed confidentially for an IPO in June and is expected to list by early 2027. Anthropic, founded by researchers who left OpenAI over disagreements about governance and safety, also competes with SpaceX's xAI, Alphabet's Google and Meta. Amazon and Google are early strategic partners that invested billions and supply cloud capacity for Claude models. Anthropic also clashed with the White House over the use of its tools, prompting the Pentagon to blacklist the company temporarily; a US judge blocked that step in August.