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Anthropic, the San Francisco company behind the Claude AI models, on Monday filed its registration papers with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering, opening its books to investors for the first time. It plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker “ANT”, and the listing is expected late next month, before the US Thanksgiving holiday.
The filing does not yet say how many shares will be sold, at what price range, or on what date. Even so, the offering is widely expected to be one of the biggest in history, and possibly larger than SpaceX’s record listing in June, which raised about $86 billion.
Soaring sales, deeper losses
According to the prospectus, Anthropic earned about $16.3 billion in revenue in the first six months of 2026. Its net loss over the same period widened to $80.7 billion, which the company attributed largely to a rise in the fair value of bonds that can be converted into its shares.
Revenue in the April-June quarter was up 1,368 per cent from a year earlier, though the company cautioned that its growth rate could slow and swing from period to period. It said more than half of Fortune 500 companies were customers paying it at least $100,000 each over the 12 months to September 30. Computing and infrastructure will stay its largest expense for the foreseeable future, it said, and it acknowledged that some of its forward investments “may seem irresponsibly large at first glance”.
A risk section unlike most
Across roughly 90 pages of risk factors, Anthropic warned that advanced AI systems could “pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity” if they are misused, weaponised or allowed to act with a high degree of autonomy without proper safeguards. It said its models could show “self-preserving behaviours”, including behaviour resembling blackmail, and that using AI to speed up its own research could push capabilities ahead of its ability to build matching safety measures.
The company also flagged more conventional business risks: heavy reliance on a small number of cloud providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft, on Taiwanese chipmakers facing intense demand, and on data centres concentrated in the US. It cited possible regulatory action over harms linked to its models, including use by children and vulnerable people. On the same day, the owners of Elvis Presley’s music rights sued Anthropic, accusing it of using hundreds of his songs to train Claude.
Why it matters
Anthropic would be the first company focused entirely on AI to go public, making its debut a test of how Wall Street values frontier AI labs at a time when a global sell-off in tech stocks has raised doubts about whether huge spending on chips and data centres will pay off quickly. Some investors now value the company at about $1.5 trillion, down from roughly $2 trillion a week ago, according to Reuters. It was valued at $965 billion in a funding round in May.
Founded in 2021 by chief executive Dario Amodei, his sister Daniela Amodei and others, Anthropic announced its listing plans in June. Rival OpenAI is expected to follow with its own listing early next year. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which also led the SpaceX offering, are the lead banks among 22 underwriters. The next step is the setting of a price range and share count, which will show how much the company aims to raise.
