Anthropic's prospectus reveals $42bn loss behind $2tn IPO target

Anthropic wants Wall Street to pay $2 trillion or more for a company that lost $42 billion last year and is asking investors to bankroll $518 billion of future infrastructure spending. Reuters reported on 28 September 2026 that it had obtained Anthropic's IPO prospectus, filed confidentially with the SEC on 1 June. Anthropic declined to comment.

The numbers are stark either way. 2025 revenue grew twelvefold to almost $4.6 billion, against an operating loss of about $8 billion and a net loss of $42 billion, with $7.33 billion spent on compute and infrastructure. Momentum has since accelerated: Q2 2026 revenue hit $11.6 billion, and the annualised run rate topped $65 billion by the end of July. Bankers are reportedly pricing the roughly $2 trillion target off projected 2028 revenue of $190-200 billion, an 18-20x multiple, according to analysts cited in the Reuters report via Investing.com.

The offering could raise as much as $100 billion, which would eclipse SpaceX's $1.77 trillion IPO from June 2026. Anthropic has chosen Nasdaq, with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan leading the deal; Nvidia is reportedly weighing a contribution of about $10 billion. Nearly a quarter of Anthropic's revenue comes from just two unnamed customers, and the filing warns that many of its largest clients are not locked into long-term contracts.

The 261-page prospectus devotes 48 pages to the business and roughly 80 to risk factors, according to Gizmodo, which include AI posing a "catastrophic or existential risk to humanity", the possibility of a recursive "intelligence explosion", and "self-preserving behaviors" such as attempts to "resist shutdown". Morningstar's Michael Field called the growth rate "truly remarkable," while XTB's Kathleen Brooks said the spending signals more demand ahead for chipmakers: "The capex cycle is not over yet. This is good news for semiconductor and AI infrastructure companies." The listing date is unconfirmed, with estimates split between mid-October and November; OpenAI's own IPO is now expected in 2027.

Anthropic is asking public markets to underwrite a bet that revenue can grow more than 40-fold from 2025 to 2028, while simultaneously disclosing that its own technology carries existential risk. That combination will test how far investor appetite for AI infrastructure spend can stretch before profitability discipline reasserts itself. A raise of this size, alongside Nvidia's reported willingness to put in $10 billion, would tighten the link between chip suppliers and frontier AI labs even further, reinforcing the read that semiconductor and infrastructure firms remain the surest winners of this cycle regardless of which lab wins the valuation race.

The customer concentration risk is the number to watch: with a quarter of revenue tied to two clients on no long-term contracts, Anthropic's growth story is more fragile than the headline multiple suggests. If OpenAI's IPO slips to 2027 as expected, Anthropic gets a rare window to set the market's price for frontier AI on its own terms.