Anthropic filed its IPO prospectus, revealing a $42 billion loss last year, while revenue grew 12-fold to $4.6 billion. The risk section warns of threats to human survival.

Anthropic released its initial public offering prospectus, outlining an artificial intelligence company attempting to enter the capital market with an astronomical valuation, while also acknowledging that its core technology may pose a "catastrophic or even existential risk" to humanity.

According to a prospectus obtained by Reuters on September 28, Anthropic's revenue is projected to grow 12-fold to nearly $4.6 billion by 2025, while its operating loss is expected to widen to $8.06 billion from $2.98 billion in 2024 .

The company spent $7.33 billion on computing power and infrastructure last year, more than double the amount in 2024, accounting for more than half of its total operating expenses of $12.65 billion.

The prospectus shows that Anthropic plans to invest $518 billion in cloud computing, computing power, and infrastructure over the next few years , but the actual say of common shareholders will be significantly limited after the IPO. The seven co-founders will hold 50.1% of the voting rights on key matters through a new entity called "Founder LLC".

This IPO comes at a time when AI and chip stocks have recently been sold off, which will further test the market's ability to withstand the enthusiasm for AI investment.

As previously mentioned by Wall Street News , Anthropic's IPO may be postponed until after the US midterm elections in November.

Valuation targets 2 trillion, more than double its own expectations six months ago.

Anthropic's IPO is targeting a valuation of over $2 trillion, while in May of this year, the company itself projected a valuation of $965 billion. In just a few months, the valuation expectation has more than doubled.

Of the nearly $42 billion net loss, approximately $34 billion was non-cash accounting expenses, reflecting the increase in the fair value of equity-convertible instruments under previous financing arrangements, rather than operating cash outflows. As of December 31, 2025, the company held $20.28 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments.

The prospectus also reveals several business risks: nearly a quarter of the revenue comes from two customers, and most of the major customers have not signed long-term contracts and may reduce or stop purchasing at any time.

If this IPO goes through, it will be one of the strongest performing IPOs in the US market since 2021.

A point of reference might be SpaceX's IPO in June of this year. Musk's company saw its stock price surge 19% to $160 on its first day of trading, but it has since fallen back to about $147, making investors cautious about the high valuations of high-growth companies.

Risk Warning: The prospectus devotes 80 pages to discussing the threat of AI.

In this 261-page prospectus, the risk factors section is approximately 80 pages long, almost twice the length of the 48-page business description. In contrast, SpaceX's 277-page prospectus has only about 38 pages dedicated to risk factors.

In its document, Anthropic explicitly warned that its AI models may exhibit "self-protective behaviors," including "resisting shutdown," "concealing or manipulating information," and "extortion-like" behavior. It also noted that "the development of highly advanced models and the expansion of use cases may further increase the risk of harm caused by the models."

The company also admitted that the model may develop unexpected capabilities during training, and these capabilities "may not be discovered until the model is deployed and causes a major security incident."

Evan Hubinger, a security researcher at the company, estimates that the probability of AI causing human deaths exceeds 10% within the next decade.

Nevertheless, Anthropic did not disclose the actual scale of its investment in security in the filing. The company stated that, for example, in one week in July of this year, approximately 6% of the computing power used by its AI research institute was dedicated to security work.

The company acknowledges that the commercial return on its security investments is currently unclear, but also states:

The market will reward reliable, trustworthy, and secure AI systems.

Governance structure: led by the founding team, with limited say for ordinary investors.

To strike a balance between commercial interests and its mission to ensure AI safety, Anthropic has designed a unique corporate governance structure.

The company will continue to operate as the Delaware Public Interest Corporation (PBC), while establishing a new entity, "Founder LLC," comprised of seven co-founders. This entity will hold Class F stock and have 50.1% of the total voting rights on key corporate matters, including major issues such as the election of some directors.

Each Class A ordinary share offered to retail investors has only one vote, but under the aforementioned structure, its actual influence will be significantly limited. The prospectus also acknowledges that this structure may lead to certain decisions "conflicting with short-, medium-, or long-term financial interests and business performance, thereby negatively impacting the value of Class A ordinary shares."

Of the seven founders, CEO Dario Amodei and his sister, Daniela Amodei, who is also the company's president and chairman, are the key figures.

In 2025, Dario's compensation is estimated at $18 million, and Daniela's at $16.4 million, primarily in the form of stock and option awards. Both, along with the other co-founders, have pledged to donate 80% of their personal Anthropic equity to philanthropy.

Anthropic's board of directors has four additional members, who will be elected by a "long-term interest trust" established by the company. The current trustees include former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and national security expert Richard Fontaine.

A trillion-dollar AI arms race: OpenAI is the biggest rival.

Anthropic faces fierce competition from many parties in the field of AI, with its main rival being OpenAI.

The two companies are locked in a fierce battle for enterprise clients, top talent, and policy influence in Washington. According to media reports, OpenAI secretly filed for an IPO in June of this year and is expected to complete its listing by early 2027 at the latest.

Anthropic was founded about five years ago by a group of researchers who left OpenAI due to disagreements over corporate governance and AI safety philosophies. In March 2023, it released its first large-scale language model, directly competing with OpenAI. Furthermore, the company is also vying for dominance in the AI infrastructure field with SpaceX's xAI, Alphabet's Google, and Meta.

Amazon and Google were two of Anthropic's early strategic partners, each investing billions of dollars and providing cloud computing infrastructure support for the training and deployment of Claude models.

Analysts believe that the first pure AI company to go public will set a benchmark for the valuation system of the entire industry and provide investors who have been waiting for many years with a direct channel to enter the AI field.

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