Anthropic has filed its S-1 form with the SEC and is preparing for a November IPO, which could value the company at up to $2 trillion.
If the investment bankers leading the deal, including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley, can close the transaction at the higher end of the reported $1.5 trillion – $2 trillion valuation, it could become the largest IPO in history.
The S-1 was filed publicly after a dire two weeks for the AI trade, introducing new numbers that immediately sparked a rally in some of the worst-hit AI plays.
“Anthropic’s IPO is shaping up to be a major test of investor appetite for AI, especially as it’s arriving at a particularly turbulent time for markets. The gloss is beginning to come off some of the AI investment boom, as investors take a harder look at whether the eye-watering sums being poured into the technology will ultimately generate the returns needed to justify valuations,” said Susannah Streeter, Chief Investment Strategist, Wealth Club.
“The company behind Claude is expanding at phenomenal speed, with reported revenue of around $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026. But the reported $80.7 billion net loss underlines just how difficult it can be to assess the economics of building advanced AI models, particularly when financing arrangements and changes in the value of complex instruments can have a dramatic impact on the numbers.”
One notable stat from the filing was how the cost of compute and AI infrastructure fell as a percentage of Anthropic’s revenue. Once over 1000% of revenue, this figure has fallen to just 55%, suggesting a sustainable business model that strengthens the investment case not only for Anthropic but also for the wider industry.
The company recorded $80bn in losses in the first half of this year, but much of it was non-cash accounting for the revaluation of bonds related to the IPO. It spent $9bn on compute.
As expected, Anthropic highlighted a long list of risks in the S-1 filing. These are usually fairly generic and a little boring in most filings, but as the first frontier AI company, Anthropic had the chance to shake things up, and it did, with 90 pages of risks.
The standout was the widely covered warning that AI could pose ‘catastrophic or existential risks to humanity’. Always likely to grab headlines, this was accompanied by others that highlighted the fast pace of the AI industry and the sheer scale of potential costs as the technology develops.
“If we are unable to secure adequate compute or if we fail to direct our compute effectively across our workloads, we may be unable to train models that remain competitive with those of our competitors or adequately serve our customers,” Anthropic said in the filing.
A lot hinges on this IPO. If successful, it could spark a fresh wave of buying in the sector or exacerbate fears that revenue may not keep pace with spending, which have reared their head in recent weeks.