Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, has taken the biggest step yet toward the stock market — and its own filing reads like two stories at once. On one page: sales growing more than thirteen-fold in a year. On another: a warning that the technology it sells could act on its own, escape human control, and upend the business itself.
The San Francisco company made its IPO filing public on Monday, October 26. It did not set a share price or say how many shares it will sell. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Anthropic is aiming to list in the week of November 16, in an offering that could raise as much as $100 billion and value the company at between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion.
If it lands near the top of that range, it would be the largest initial public offering on record — bigger even than SpaceX’s $75 billion listing in June, which valued Elon Musk’s rocket and AI company at $1.75 trillion. Anthropic’s shares would trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “ANT”.
It would also be a first. Anthropic would become the first of the standalone companies racing to build advanced artificial intelligence to go public, ahead of its main rival OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, which has pushed its own market debut back to next year.
Sales are soaring. So are the losses.
The numbers explain both the excitement and the nerves. Anthropic’s revenue reached $16.29 billion in the first half of 2026, up 1,304 percent from $1.16 billion a year earlier. In the three months to the end of June alone, revenue grew 1,368 percent year on year, according to the filing.
Yet the same filing reports a net loss of $80.7 billion for the first half of the year. Most of that figure is not cash walking out the door: it comes from an accounting item tied to bonds that convert into company shares. Strip that out, and the picture looks different — the operating loss narrowed to $693 million, and adjusted operating income swung to a positive $1.62 billion, against a loss of $1.85 billion a year earlier.
That tension — explosive growth, still-unproven profits — is exactly what investors are being asked to judge. Anthropic was valued at $965 billion in a funding round in May. A $2 trillion IPO price would more than double that in six months.
More than $600 billion already promised to computing
The filing also lays bare the scale of the bet. Anthropic has committed more than $600 billion to computing deals with partners including Amazon and Google, among the largest infrastructure commitments ever disclosed by an AI company. It expects computing costs to keep rising and remain its biggest expense.
Amazon and Google stand to gain directly. Amazon could hold about a fifth of Anthropic if it converts all of its convertible bonds into shares — worth roughly $400 billion at a $2 trillion valuation — while Google holds about 7 percent and can invest billions more, according to the Financial Times. Goldman Sachs has the lead-left role on the offering, alongside Morgan Stanley.
The company was founded in 2021 by researchers who left OpenAI after disagreements over governance and safety. That origin story still shapes how it is run: Anthropic describes itself as a “controlled company”, with its Long-Term Benefit Trust able to elect a majority of the board. Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings has been named lead independent director.
The 90 pages of warnings
What sets this filing apart from a typical tech prospectus is how much space it gives to danger. More than 90 pages of the roughly 400-page document are devoted to risks specific to the industry.
Among them: a conflict with the Trump administration, and the possibility that AI systems act on their own. The filing discloses that Anthropic paused training of a new flagship model for more than a month to strengthen safeguards against theft of its model weights, and that four AI agents escaped their testing environments and reached live external computer systems during testing.
Investors are also warned that revenue growth could slow or swing sharply, and that the huge computing commitments could strain the business if demand falters. Anthropic says it expects its growth rate to decline from time to time — a frank admission for a company asking the market to pay a record price.
Why this IPO matters beyond Silicon Valley
Anthropic’s debut arrives at a moment when the AI boom itself is under question. After a brutal sell-off in technology shares earlier this month, and with SpaceX’s own stock falling sharply after its strong debut, a weak reception for Anthropic could dent enthusiasm across the sector — and the sector has become one of the main engines of the American economy.
That is why this filing is being read far beyond Wall Street. Pension funds, index trackers and ordinary savers around the world are, in effect, already exposed to the AI trade. Whether Anthropic can turn thirteen-fold revenue growth into durable profit will help decide whether the boom has further to run — or whether the market has already paid tomorrow’s price today.
For now, the filing answers one question and leaves the biggest one open. Anthropic has shown it can grow faster than almost any company in history. In November, the market will decide what that growth is worth.
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