Published: Sep 29, 2026, 9:19 PM
Read Time: 3 min
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By Echo Wang
Sept 28 (Reuters) - Anthropic is making a massive bet that AI will transform the global economy more profoundly than industrialization, electricity and the internet, according to its IPO prospectus seen by Reuters.
But the cost to get there will be staggering. Anthropic reported a net loss of $42 billion in 2025, and plans to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in coming years, according to the prospectus.
The prospectus details how the company has grown sharply in the last year — while also posting wider losses. Revenue grew 12-fold in 2025 to nearly $4.6 billion, even as the company lost more than $8 billion on an operating basis, excluding writedowns of various liabilities mostly tied to previous fundraising, according to the documents, reported here for the first time.
The public sale, which could value it at more than $2 trillion, would capitalize on the rapid rise of the AI startup lab that only came into existence five years ago, and establish it as a benchmark for how Wall Street values AI's leading companies, including rival OpenAI.
The plans come as Anthropic confronts evidence from its own research that increasingly autonomous AI models can behave in unexpected and potentially harmful ways, including sabotaging code, assisting fraud and manipulating information in controlled tests.
These reports have broken into the wider public sphere, igniting fears over how companies can keep the increasingly powerful systems under control as they race to deploy them commercially.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for the global AI community to slow the pace of releasing new capabilities to address those concerns. Still, Anthropic rolled out its new Opus 5.5 model last week to counter OpenAI's momentum since its launch of GPT-6 Astra, ahead of its own expected IPO.
The AI lab spent $7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure last year, a threefold surge from 2024, accounting for more than half of its $12.65 billion in total operating expenses.
Anthropic's public market debut is likely to be pushed to after the November US midterm elections, Reuters previously reported, citing sources. The sale would bring public investors into an AI race that has been until now underwritten by venture capital firms, sovereign wealth funds and Big Tech companies.
Anthropic declined to comment.
Anthropic's expected valuation target is more than double its own estimated valuation of $965 billion in May.
