Anthropic is preparing to go public with a valuation target exceeding $2 trillion, according to a Reuters report based on the AI company's IPO prospectus — a debut that would rank among the largest public offerings in history and cement the Claude maker's status as the most richly valued private AI company ever to list.
The prospectus, reviewed by Reuters and reported on Monday, paints a picture of explosive commercial growth paired with staggering costs. Revenue surged nearly twelvefold in 2025 to $4.6 billion, while the company posted a net loss of $42 billion — most of it an accounting charge rather than cash spent on operations.
Roughly $34 billion of that loss came from a rise in the estimated value of financing that could eventually convert into Anthropic shares, with the operating loss exceeding $8 billion. The listing, expected after the November US midterm elections, targets a raise of up to $100 billion.
If completed, it would be the largest share sale ever completed, overtaking SpaceX's record offering. Anthropic has already secured its listing venue, choosing Nasdaq, and its founders are seeking to retain majority voting control after going public.
Growth at any cost
The filing reveals just how capital-intensive the frontier AI business has become. Anthropic spent $7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure in 2025 — triple the previous year and more than half of its $12.65 billion in total operating expenses.
It has also committed to $518 billion in future cloud, computing, and infrastructure obligations, underscoring the colossal scale of the data-center buildout it considers necessary to stay competitive. Despite the burn, the company's trajectory is remarkable.
Its annualized revenue run rate topped $100 billion in mid-September, according to the New York Times, up from $65 billion at the end of July and just $9 billion at the end of 2025 — roughly an elevenfold increase in under a year.
Second-quarter revenue alone reached $11.5 billion, up from $787 million in the same period last year. The company ended 2025 with $20.28 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments.
A thesis to justify $2 trillion
The prospectus lays out an ambitious long-term thesis to justify the price tag: that machine learning will trigger an economic transformation surpassing the Industrial Revolution, electrification, and the internet combined.
The $2 trillion target is more than double the company's $965 billion valuation from its Series H-1 private round in May, reflecting a rapid repricing of AI labs over just four months.
Timing matters. Pushing the listing to November gives Anthropic a completed third quarter of financials to show public investors before pricing, rather than asking them to extrapolate from a partial quarter — and lets its numbers be read against OpenAI's product cycle after the rival's GPT-6.1 Astra launch.
OpenAI, for its part, confidentially filed for its own IPO in June, setting up a battle of two AI giants on public markets.
What comes next
Anthropic has not yet filed its public registration statement on the SEC's EDGAR database, and Reuters noted the deal could still shift.
Watch for the public S-1, expected in October, which should reveal whether third-quarter actuals matched the reported run rate — and whether Nvidia's reported $10 billion anchor investment in the IPO is confirmed by name in the filing.
For Wall Street, the question is no longer whether AI companies can grow; it is whether public investors will pay $2 trillion for the privilege of funding that growth.
By Hamza Faisal
