Anthropic's IPO filing shows AI's high cost and grand ambition

Anthropic's IPO prospectus reveals a bet that AI will transform the global economy more profoundly than industrialization, electricity, or the internet, but at an exorbitant cost. The company reported a net loss of $42 billion in 2025 and plans to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing, and infrastructure obligations next year. Revenue grew 12-fold in 2025 to nearly $4.6 billion, though operating losses exceeded $8 billion excluding accounting write-downs. The public offering could value the AI startup at over $2 trillion, establishing a benchmark for how Wall Street values leading AI companies like rival OpenAI. The IPO may be delayed until after November's US midterm elections. Anthropic faces concerns from its own research about autonomous AI models behaving unpredictably, and nearly a quarter of its revenue came from just two clients without long-term contracts.