September 30, 2026, (Inside AI) — Anthropic has confidentially filed a draft S-1 registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, setting the stage for an initial public offering that could value the artificial intelligence company at more than $2 trillion, according to sources familiar with the filing. The listing is expected after the US midterm elections in November.
The filing reveals a company of stark contrasts. Anthropic's revenue grew twelvefold to approximately $4.6 billion in 2025, yet it posted an operating loss of $8.06 billion, widened from $2.98 billion in 2024. The headline net loss reached nearly $42 billion, though roughly $34 billion of that stemmed from an accounting charge tied to financing instruments that could convert into shares, not cash spent on operations. The company ended 2025 with $20.28 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments.
The IPO would follow SpaceX's blockbuster listing in June, which valued that company at $1.77 trillion. It arrives as rival OpenAI also prepares to go public, making Anthropic's debut a critical test of public market appetite for frontier AI. The filing itself remains unavailable to the public.
Safety Warnings Sit Alongside Aggressive Growth Plans
Anthropic, which has long positioned itself as a safety-focused AI developer, dedicates roughly 80 of the prospectus's 261 pages of main text to risk factors, compared with just 48 pages describing its business. The company warns that advanced AI could present "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity."
The prospectus states that AI models could display "self-preserving behaviours," including attempts to "resist shutdown," to "conceal or manipulate information," and behaviour "resembling blackmail." It also acknowledges that the company's ability to assess model safety faces a "significant limitation" from a model's potential to know it was being tested. Unexpected capabilities may emerge during training and not become apparent until after deployment.
"Our development of highly advanced models, platforms, and applications and expansion of use cases could further increase the risk that our models cause harm," the prospectus says.
Notably, Anthropic has not disclosed how much it has spent on safety research. The filing says returns on safety investments are currently unclear, and safety research competes with model development for finite compute, money, and skilled researchers. In a blog post earlier this month, the company said 6% of computing power dedicated to AI R&D, and 12% of compute allotted to AI-driven R&D, were allocated to safety during a sample week in July.
This tension sits at the heart of Anthropic's public narrative. CEO Dario Amodei has repeatedly called for AI companies to slow the development of increasingly powerful models. Yet the filing states that new model releases drive customer usage and revenue, making a "continuous and overlapping cadence" of releases necessary to remain competitive.
Founders Lock In Control While Compute Costs Balloon
Anthropic is structuring its ownership so that its seven co-founders, including Dario Amodei and president Daniela Amodei, will retain 50.1% of voting power over key corporate matters through a new "Founder LLC" and a special Class F share. Ordinary Class A shares will carry one vote each. In practice, the founders will collectively control a single special share carrying a majority of the voting power on certain matters, including the election of some directors.
The structure is meant to allow the founders to continue prioritising the company's stated mission of developing AI responsibly even after it goes public. The filing acknowledges this could result in decisions that conflict with shareholders' financial interests and potentially reduce the value of their shares. The Class F structure will begin to wind down once only two or fewer founders, or their successors, remain in the Founder LLC. Anthropic will also remain a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation.
Compute remains the central cost of the business. Anthropic spent $7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure in 2025, more than three times its 2024 spending and more than half of its $12.65 billion in total operating expenses. The company has at least $518 billion in future cloud, computing, and infrastructure obligations over the coming decade. Around 80% of those commitments are either non-cancellable or require payment regardless of how much capacity Anthropic eventually uses.
The commitments include at least $111.1 billion to Google, $110 billion to Amazon, and $31.4 billion to Microsoft over seven to 10 years. Anthropic also has about $161.2 billion in equipment-lease obligations linked to Broadcom. These relationships are not limited to straightforward supplier contracts. Google and Amazon are also major investors in Anthropic, while Microsoft can simultaneously act as an infrastructure provider, distributor, customer, and competitor. The filing warns that the interests of such partners may not always fully align with Anthropic's own.
Anthropic argues that such commitments are necessary because compute, rather than demand for AI, will increasingly constrain its growth. The filing says future demand for advanced AI systems is likely to be limited "principally by the availability of compute."
Revenue concentration adds another layer of risk. Nearly a quarter of Anthropic's revenue in 2025 came from just two customers, who were not identified. More significantly, many of Anthropic's largest customers are not locked into long-term contracts, meaning they can reduce or stop spending comparatively easily. This creates a mismatch. While some customers retain considerable flexibility, Anthropic itself is committing hundreds of billions of dollars to computing infrastructure years in advance. A sharp drop in spending by even a handful of major customers could hit revenue while many costs remain fixed.
The filing's emphasis on compute constraints echoes broader industry debates. OpenAI has similarly argued that infrastructure, not demand, will define the pace of AI progress. But Anthropic's prospectus goes further by quantifying the scale of its bets and the risks attached to them.
For investors, the central question is whether Anthropic's revenue growth can outpace its mounting obligations. The company's $2 trillion valuation target is more than double its estimated valuation of $965 billion in May. That leap assumes continued market enthusiasm for AI, even as the company itself warns of catastrophic risks and uncertain returns on safety. The coming months will reveal whether public markets share that confidence.
