Anthropic filed paperwork on Monday to sell shares to the public, setting up what could be the largest stock market debut in history and exposing the costs behind the boom in artificial intelligence.
The filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows the maker of the Claude chatbot lost $80.7bn in the first six months of 2026, after a $42bn loss for all of 2025. Revenue for the quarter ended 30 June grew 1,368% from a year earlier, while the cost of the cloud services that run its models rose 300% over the same period.
What the filing shows
Anthropic said it has raised about $141bn of capital and holds $112.4bn in cash. It expects that money to cover the next 12 months, but warned that "we may be required to seek additional financing sooner than we currently anticipate" if infrastructure costs keep climbing.
The company plans to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the deal, as they did for SpaceX in June. People close to the process expect shares to start trading in mid-November, at a valuation above $2 trillion.
Why the loss is so large
The gap between revenue growth and profit is a computing bill. Training and running large models requires rented processors, power and data centre space, and Anthropic buys most of that from cloud providers rather than owning it.
That structure turns a fast-growing software business into one with heavy fixed costs, and it explains why the loss widened even as sales multiplied. It also explains the timing of the listing: the company needs public markets to fund the next round of capacity.
A test for the AI trade
The offering arrives later than bankers had hoped, as investors question whether the returns justify the spending. Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, wrote on Sunday that AI "has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech", adding that margins are rising for the largest seven technology companies but flat for the rest of the S&P 500.
Anthropic also faces litigation over training data; the owners of Elvis Presley's music rights sued the company in October, alleging that hundreds of songs were used without permission.
Three questions will dominate the roadshow: how concentrated revenue is among a few customers, how quickly serving costs fall as models get cheaper to run, and who pays for the next generation of computing capacity.