Anthropic’s IPO Filing Pairs $80 Billion in Losses With 14-Fold Revenue Growth
Anthropic filed for an initial public offering on Monday, CNBC reported, and investors are already sizing the Claude maker in the trillions of dollars.
The company is asking buyers to look past more than $80 billion in first-half 2026 losses and focus on a 14-fold rise in revenue.
Second-quarter revenue reached $11.56 billion, up from $787 million a year earlier. Anthropic posted $974 million in operating income for the quarter after five straight quarters of operating losses.
It held almost $132 billion in cash, equivalents and short-term investments at the end of June.
Deep Ties to the Largest Tech Companies
Close to half of Anthropic's revenue comes from Claude being sold through the cloud divisions of Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet. All three hold investments in the company.
In the IPO, up to $77 billion in notes (debt securities) can be issued to Amazon, Broadcom and Google. Microsoft and Nvidia agreed to invest $15 billion as Anthropic builds computing capacity.
Alphabet, which has an investment-grade credit rating, committed to backstop Anthropic for a data center in Texas.
Anthropic would be the third company to list at a valuation above $1 trillion, after Saudi Aramco and SpaceX, which debuted in June. OpenAI could be the fourth.
Venture Investors See a Reset Risk
Jai Das, co-founder of Sapphire Ventures, said in the CNBC report that if Anthropic falls short of expectations, the whole structure could prove fragile, like a house of cards.
Brad Bernstein, a managing partner at growth equity firm FTV Capital, told CNBC that weak results would make Anthropic the bellwether for AI. In his view, valuations across venture-backed AI companies would then have to be reset.
Bessemer Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures each told CNBC that Anthropic is their largest investment ever.
Warning for Public Markets
David Trainer, CEO of research firm New Constructs, wrote last month that the AI boom rests on cheap credit and capital-market access staying available. If AI liquidity dries up, he wrote, the S&P 500 faces roughly 20% downside risk, mostly in AI-related stocks.
Anthropic says it is early. Fortune 500 companies committed less than 0.1% of their total expenses to its models and services in the latest quarter, a figure Michael Monaghan, a portfolio manager at Founder ETFs, called part of the investment thesis.
Public Benefit Fund Pledge
Earlier this month, Anthropic said it would commit 5% of its shares to a new Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, pending stockholder approval, the Economic Times reported in an Associated Press story.
With $200 million already committed to studying AI's economic effects, the company says roughly 20% of its shares will go toward the public good, according to the Economic Times.
The fund is structured as a limited-liability company, which is not bound by the 5% annual payout rule that applies to foundations.
Brian Mittendorf, an accounting professor at Ohio State University, said, as the Economic Times reported, that payouts to individuals, which a charity could not make, would leave the fund in an ambiguous area over how the public benefits.