Anthropic still expects to be valued at $2 trillion.
Anthropic’s draft IPO prospectus has now started circulating in the media (after its confidential June SEC filing) and revealed some significant risks, Reuters reported. The first of those is fiscal, as the company reported an operating loss of $8 billion last year (on a $42 billion net loss), despite a 12-fold revenue increase from the year before to $4.6 billion. The other is a veritable first for a company prospectus, with Anthropic stating that its AI tech may pose “existential risks to humanity.”
Despite an estimated $2 trillion valuation ahead of its IPO, Anthropic hasn’t been a money-spinning operation so far. The company plans to spend $518 billion on data center infrastructure over the coming years despite its meager 2025 revenue. The costs of financing that help explain why it took a $42 billion loss, which may be absorbed by shareholders in the coming IPO.
On the plus side, the company had an operating profit on $11.5 billion of revenue in Q2 2026, and expects to post another operating profit next quarter. However, a fourth of that revenue reportedly came from just two clients, according to The Financial Times. The company didn’t say which two, but it was reported in August that Meta projected it might spend up to $10 billion with Anthropic annually. On top of that, many of Anthropic’s biggest customers weren’t locked into long-term contracts and could cut off spending at any time.
As for a potential AI armageddon, Anthropic said that its own research showed that its increasingly autonomous AI models have recently shown worrisome behavior. That includes sabotaging code, abetting fraud and manipulating data in controlled tests, according to the prospectus.
Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei recently called for AI companies to slow the pace of new development to address those and other issues. Anthropic’s main rival OpenAI seemed to agree with that sentiment and even scrapped the release of its latest model, GPT-6.1 Astra, over safety concerns. However, Amodei’s call to action didn’t stop Anthropic from releasing its new Opus 5.5 model last week to keep up with OpenAI.
