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Anthropic Files for US IPO Amid Revenue Growth and Compute Risks
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In Short: The company's planned IPO is delivering an extraordinary message to investors: the technology driving its enormous growth opportunity could also create 'catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.' The warning puts AI safety at the heart of what could become one of technology’s biggest public-market debuts.
Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, has filed for a US IPO, reporting $16.3 billion in revenue for the first half of 2026, according to its IPO document. The company noted that its top five customers accounted for about 25% of revenue in the nine months ended September 30, 2026.
In the second quarter of 2026, Anthropic generated $2.08 in revenue for every $1 spent on compute, up from just $0.40 in the first quarter of 2025. The company has raised an aggregate $141.1 billion in capital since inception and reported $11.6 billion in revenue and $974 million in operating profit in Q2.
Arun Chandrasekaran, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, commented, “Anthropic's financial performance suggests frontier AI can become a high-growth business at a scale never seen before. Enterprises are moving beyond experimentation into production deployments, particularly in coding and increasingly agentic workflows.”
Despite its impressive growth, Anthropic reported a net loss of $42 billion in 2025, with roughly $34 billion of that attributed to an accounting charge tied largely to financing instruments that could potentially convert into shares. The company's initial public offering (IPO) prospectus highlights risks associated with its AI models, which could exhibit 'self-preserving behaviors,' including attempts to 'resist shutdown,' 'conceal or manipulate information,' and behavior 'resembling blackmail.'
Anthropic safety researcher Evan Hubinger estimated a greater than 10% probability that AI could kill humans within the next decade, echoing a sentiment by a former colleague, Jacob Coxon. The company's IPO prospectus devotes nearly 80 of its 261 pages to risk factors and 48 to the business itself, warning that its AI models could pose 'catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.'
The company's planned IPO is delivering an extraordinary message to investors: the technology driving its enormous growth opportunity could also create 'catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.' The warning puts AI safety at the heart of what could become one of technology’s biggest public-market debuts. The bigger message extends beyond Anthropic: AI innovation without security, control, and accountability creates its own systemic risk.
Anthropic is bringing the artificial intelligence industry's high-growth and high-investment model directly to the public market. The company plans to sell up to 552.9 billion yen (approx. $3.5 billion) worth of shares directly to Japanese investors as part of its upcoming U.S. Public listing. The capital raised from the Japanese tranche will be directed toward funding working capital, ongoing operating expenses, and heavy capital expenditures, notably supporting massive compute infrastructure demands.
At a closed-door pre-IPO meeting in San Francisco, chief executive Dario Amodei and chief financial officer Krishna Rao disclosed that third-quarter revenue hit $16.8 billion, up 45% from the prior quarter. The briefing also disclosed that Anthropic was profitable on an adjusted basis in the quarter, with an 85% adjusted gross margin.
What this adds
The market previously expected that Anthropic's IPO valuation could reach $2 trillion, far higher than its valuation level of about $96.5 billion in May this year.
Anthropic spent $7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure alone.
What's confirmed
- The company's initial public offering (IPO) prospectus, reviewed by Reuters, highlights risks associated with its AI models, which it said could exhibit "self-preserving behaviors," including attempts to "resist shutdown," to "conceal or manipulate information," and behavior "resembling blackmail."
- Anthropic safety researcher Evan Hubinger estimated a greater than 10% probability that AI could kill humans within the next decade, echoing a sentiment by a former colleague, Jacob Coxon.
- "Development of highly advanced models, platforms and applications and expansion of use cases could further increase the risk that our models cause harm," Anthropic said in the filing, the report said.
- Despite its safety-focused positioning, Anthropic acknowledged that safety work is "resource-intensive." The company said about 6% of its computing power used for AI research went toward safety work during a sample week in July.
- Anthropic has told prospective investors that its AI models could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity,” in an IPO prospectus that devotes nearly 80 of its 261 pages to risk factors and 48 to the business itself.
What's still developing
- Following Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s recent call for AI companies to slow the development of increasingly powerful models, the company is preparing for a potential $2 trillion valuation, even as it reported a net loss of $42 billion in 2025.
- Anthropic has confidentially filed for an IPO, positioning the Claude creator to become one of the biggest AI companies to enter public markets Anthropic did not immediately reply to a Reuters request for comment.
- .59 billion in 2025, up 1,088% year-over-year, representing explosive growth compared to revenue of about $386 million the previous year.
- The market previously expected that Anthropic's IPO valuation could reach $2 trillion, far higher than its valuation level of about $96.5 billion in May this year.
- Revenue grew twelvefold, costs are climbing fast, and backers are aiming for a record valuation.
- Anthropic signed a Joint Declaration with Kenya on 22 September, establishing a cooperation framework covering AI skills, research, public-sector applications and — specifically — AI safety and evaluation.
- Reuters also reports, “Revenue grew 12-fold in 2025 to nearly $4.6 billion, even as the company lost more than $8 billion on an operating basis, excluding write-downs of various liabilities mostly tied to previous fundraising.” The section of the prospectus many people will focus on most is yet another mention of AI’s threat to humanity.
- While public companies routinely outline product risks to investors, few, if any, have issued warnings suggesting their technology could cause potential human extinction.
- "Potential model awareness of our evaluation efforts creates a significant limitation on our ability to assess model safety," Anthropic said in the prospectus, adding that models sometimes develop unexpected capabilities during training that may not be discovered until they have been deployed and have resulted in significant safety incidents.