Anthropic files for IPO expected to be the largest in history, first public accounts show 16 billion dollars of revenue and more than 80 billion in half-year losses
Prospectus counts bad press about AI dangers among its business risks
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Anthropic filed its S-1 prospectus on Monday for a listing on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker ANT, in an offering widely anticipated to be the largest in history. The first public look at the company's accounts shows what public markets are being asked to underwrite: $16 billion of revenue in the first half of the year, against losses of more than $80 billion.
The prospectus details where the money goes. Anthropic spent $8.9 billion renting computing from others in the first half, nearly four times as much as a year earlier, against $482 million on property and equipment of its own. It has signed four non-cancelable contracts worth roughly $430 billion in total — about $161 billion with Broadcom, $115 billion with Google, $110 billion with Amazon and $45 billion with Microsoft, according to Yahoo Finance's calculations. Alphabet has also extended a financing facility of up to $20 billion, which shrinks by as much as $10 billion if Google exercises an option to buy nonvoting stock at the offering price; the facility carries a 14.99 percent ownership cap that Google can waive. Nothing had been drawn as of the filing.
The risk factors make unusually direct reading. Anthropic warns that its customer base is narrow and sensitive to downturns, that it lacks the alternative revenue streams of Meta, Google or Amazon, that many clients can terminate contracts or cut usage suddenly, and that sales, marketing and user experience may matter more than model capability. The company, formed in 2021 by former OpenAI leaders and carried to prominence by its Claude Code tool and Claude Cowork enterprise offering, counts current and former employees among those warning about the threat of "killer AI" — and the S-1 lists bad media coverage of such risks among the threats to the business.
Michael Field, chief equity analyst at Morningstar, put the logic plainly: "These companies are now burning through cash to win the AI race, and public equity is the cheapest source available, particularly in a rising interest rate environment." Anthropic was valued at $965 billion as of May, and reports put the expected listing valuation at $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion. OpenAI, valued at $852 billion in March, plans its own offering next year. Big Tech is pouring more than $700 billion into data centers this year; Anthropic builds almost none of the ones it runs on.
The record on offer is four months old. SpaceX raised $86 billion when it went public in June, breaking Saudi Aramco's 2019 mark of $26 billion.