Anthropic Files for IPO: Plans to Raise Up to $100 Billion, Net Loss of $80.7 Billion in Half a Year

[[**Anthropic files for IPO, seeking to raise up to $100 billion at a valuation of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion; revenue grew 30-fold over five quarters yet it posted a net loss of $80.7 billion for the half-year, with the listing intended to sustain financing for massive compute investment.**

**Key points**

**1. Revenue surged and the company recorded its first operating profit**

Second-quarter 2026 revenue was $11.555 billion, roughly 30 times that of the first quarter of 2025, and it recorded an operating profit of $974 million for the first time; the output-to-input ratio per unit of compute rose from 0.40 to 2.08.

**2. The $80.7 billion loss is mainly a book adjustment**

Of the $80.748 billion net loss for the half-year, about $72.388 billion came from fair value changes in convertible notes, derivative liabilities and SAFEs, with adjusted net profit of $2.671 billion; the real pressure is hundreds of billions of dollars in long-term compute commitments, some of them "take-or-pay."

**3. The listing aims to lock in compute financing in advance**

Within three months financing rose from $30 billion to $65 billion and the valuation climbed from about $380 billion to $965 billion, making private funding harder to secure; although cash and short-term investments exceed $130 billion, an IPO can open up public markets for continued financing.

**4. The high valuation is constrained by channels, customers and governance**

Cloud providers contribute about 48% of revenue and channel fees are rising, about 20% of revenue comes from two customers, and many enterprises have no irrevocable long-term contracts; the founders hold 50.1% of voting rights, leaving public shareholders with limited say. 2026-10-27 15:38 The largest IPO in history is here, with a huge half-year loss of $80.7 billion—what else is hidden in Anthropic's prospectus? First New Voice quick overview

This article comes from the WeChat public account: First New Voice, author: First New Voice, original title: "The largest IPO in history is here! A huge half-year loss of $80.7 billion—what else is hidden in Anthropic's prospectus?"

Six years ago on October 26, Ant Group submitted its IPO filing, aiming for the world's largest IPO. Six years later to the day, another company planning to use "ANT" as its ticker symbol also filed a prospectus with Nasdaq.

Anthropic, the AI giant behind Claude. According to market reports, the company plans to raise up to $100 billion through its IPO, with a target valuation of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion, potentially setting a global record for IPO fundraising.

But more noteworthy than the sky-high valuation is a set of sharply contrasting figures in the prospectus.

Revenue surged 30-fold over five quarters, yet the company posted a net loss of $80.7 billion for the half-year, and it has future compute procurement and infrastructure arrangements exceeding $600 billion.

Why is an AI company that has just begun to achieve operating profitability, with more than $100 billion in cash on its books, in such a hurry to pursue the largest IPO in history?

The answer may concern not only Anthropic's valuation but also the business logic of the entire AI industry's next phase.

Anthropic's confidence to pursue a $2 trillion valuation comes most directly from the simultaneous growth of revenue scale, profitability and enterprise customer demand.

First, the revenue growth rate has far exceeded that of traditional enterprise software companies.

In 2023, Anthropic's full-year revenue was only $41 million, not even matching the $69 million in interest income over the same period. But by the second quarter of 2026, its quarterly revenue had reached $11.555 billion, equivalent to nearly 282 times its full-year 2023 revenue.

Growth truly accelerated in 2025. From $376 million in the first quarter of 2025 to $11.555 billion in the second quarter of 2026, quarterly revenue grew about 30-fold in just over a year.

For a traditional enterprise software company, sustaining annual growth of more than 30% for many consecutive years would already be quite impressive. Yet Anthropic expanded its quarterly revenue nearly 30-fold in just over a year.

This means frontier large models are shifting from capital-intensive technology R&D toward a scaled commercial business capable of generating tens of billions of dollars in quarterly revenue.

Second, even more important than the revenue surge is that Anthropic is beginning to prove that the large-model business can make money.

Over the past few years, the commercialization of large models has consistently faced a difficult problem: the stronger the model capabilities and the larger the scale of usage, the higher the compute consumption behind it. Revenue growth may not cover cost growth, and there may even be a situation where the more users there are, the greater the losses.

Anthropic was once like this too. In the first quarter of 2025, for every $1 the company spent on compute and infrastructure, it generated only $0.40 in revenue; by the fourth quarter, that ratio was still below $0.70.

But entering 2026, the situation changed markedly.

In the first quarter, revenue corresponding to every $1 of compute and infrastructure spending rose to $1.40, and in the second quarter it further rose to $2.08. In just over a year, the output-to-input ratio per unit of compute increased more than fivefold.

This change is also reflected in the income statement. In the second quarter of 2026, Anthropic recorded an operating profit of $974 million for the first time, with an operating margin of about 8.4%.

From earning only 40 cents of revenue for every $1 of compute cost to earning $2 of revenue for every $1 spent, Anthropic is crossing the most critical threshold in large-model commercialization: revenue growth is beginning to outpace compute cost growth.

Finally, what truly supports Anthropic's long-term valuation is the continuously expanding paid demand from enterprise customers.

Currently, more than half of Fortune 500 companies spend over $100,000 a year on Anthropic. Across all customers, more than 1,900 enterprises spend over $1 million annually, of which about 250 spend more than $10 million a year.

This shows that Claude is no longer just an AI tool that employees try out; it is becoming a productivity product that enterprises are willing to spend real money to purchase.

More noteworthy is that customers are not only willing to pay, but are also continuously increasing their investment.

Anthropic disclosed a net revenue retention rate of about 900%. Simply put, the same group of enterprise customers is spending about 9 times as much on Claude this year as last year.

Behind this is the continuous expansion of AI use cases. Take Claude Code as an example: enterprises may initially let only some programmers use it, and as actual results are validated, they gradually roll it out to more R&D teams and business processes, and the scale of procurement increases accordingly.

And this demand still has room to grow. According to relevant disclosures, even for enterprises that have already procured Claude on a large scale, related spending on average accounts for less than 0.1% of their total expenditure.

Therefore, Anthropic's growth potential comes not only from continuously acquiring new customers, but even more from existing customers continuously expanding the scale of their AI usage.

From the revenue surge to improved compute efficiency to enterprise customers continuously increasing procurement, Anthropic has delivered a commercialization report card that supports its high valuation.

Compared with the 30-fold revenue surge, what is more noteworthy in Anthropic's prospectus is the huge contrast between the $80.7 billion net loss and the hundreds of billions of dollars in long-term compute commitments.

On the surface, this is a company that had $16.3 billion in revenue in half a year but lost $80.7 billion. But a careful breakdown of the financial data reveals that the book loss for the period and future funding pressure are actually two different things.

First layer: most of the $80.7 billion huge loss is not money actually spent in operations.

In the first half of 2026, Anthropic had a net loss of $80.748 billion, of which about $72.388 billion came from fair value changes in financing instruments such as convertible notes, derivative liabilities and SAFEs, accounting for nearly 90% of the net loss.

Simply put, this loss mainly stems from accounting adjustments brought about by the rise in the company's valuation, rather than actual cash payments of an equivalent amount during the same period.

Previously, some investors provided funds to Anthropic through convertible notes and other means, which can be converted into company stock under agreed conditions in the future. As Anthropic's valuation continues to climb, these conversion rights have also become more valuable, and the fair value of the corresponding liabilities has risen accordingly and been recorded in profit or loss for the period.

In February this year, Anthropic's post-money valuation was about $380 billion, and in May it further rose to $965 billion. The sharp rise in valuation also amplified the related book losses.

Thus a counterintuitive result emerged: the higher the company's valuation, the larger the book loss may be.

After excluding specific items such as fair value changes and equity-based compensation, Anthropic's adjusted net profit in the first half of the year was $2.671 billion.

Of course, a non-cash loss is not the same as a fake loss, and the relevant financing instruments may still bring effects such as equity dilution. But the $80.7 billion net loss clearly cannot be directly equated with cash actually burned.

Likewise, adjusted profitability does not mean the company has achieved cash flow self-sufficiency. For an AI company like Anthropic, the real funding pressure must also be viewed in light of actual cash flow and future compute payment obligations.

Second layer: more alarming than the book loss is the hundreds of billions of dollars in future compute bills.

To secure future compute supply, Anthropic has signed massive long-term agreements with companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Broadcom.

Among them, the agreement with Google involves at least about $114.5 billion, Amazon about $110 billion, Microsoft about $44.9 billion, and a five-year AI accelerator leasing arrangement related to Broadcom about $161.2 billion.

In addition, Anthropic has reached compute procurement and leasing arrangements with a number of infrastructure companies, with some contracts lasting as long as 20 years.

However, these amounts involve different bases such as minimum payments, lease commitments and optional procurement quotas, and cannot simply be added together, let alone all be regarded as confirmed cash payment obligations.

Moreover, some agreements even adopt a model similar to the "take-or-pay" model in the energy industry: regardless of how much compute is actually used, the company may need to pay the agreed minimum fee.

This means Anthropic is using long-term payment commitments in exchange for future compute guarantees. Even if AI demand growth slows, or model efficiency improvements cause compute demand to fall short of expectations, some contract fees still need to be paid.

This is also a major difference between Anthropic and traditional software companies: revenue can fluctuate with demand, but a considerable portion of compute costs has already been locked in in advance.

Anthropic chose this moment to pursue the largest IPO in history, driven not only by its rising valuation but also by its need for funds for continued future expansion.

On the one hand, the scale of financing Anthropic needs is exceeding what the traditional private market can easily absorb.

In February 2026, Anthropic completed a $30 billion Series G round at a post-money valuation of about $380 billion; just three months later, the Series H round was further expanded to $65 billion, with the post-money valuation soaring to $965 billion.

In just three months, the financing scale doubled, and the valuation also more than doubled. Now, the company's IPO target valuation has reached the range of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion.

But the larger the financing scale, the harder it becomes to raise money in the next round.

A single round of $65 billion in financing is no longer a scale that ordinary venture capital institutions can easily take on. More importantly, Anthropic will still need to continue investing huge amounts of capital in the future for compute procurement, chip leasing, and data center construction.

On the other hand, an IPO can open up broader and more sustained financing channels for Anthropic.

Going public can not only help the company raise a large amount of capital at once, but also establish a public market valuation, providing more options for continued financing in the future through additional share issuance, bonds, and other methods.

For traditional software companies, revenue growth usually does not require a proportional increase in physical infrastructure. But frontier AI companies are different: model training, inference, and the expansion of Agent applications all require continuous investment in compute.

Therefore, whoever can obtain long-term funding support will be better able to lock in chip and data center resources in advance, providing guarantees for next-generation model research and commercialization expansion.

For Anthropic, the significance of an IPO is no longer just raising $100 billion, but also establishing sustained financing capacity for the compute competition of the coming years.

This is a real pressure for Anthropic.

As of the end of June 2026, Anthropic held more than $130 billion in cash and short-term investments combined.

This also precisely shows that Anthropic is not rushing to go public because it lacks money right now, but rather because the scale of future compute investment is too large, requiring it to establish more stable financing channels in advance.

At the same time, AI companies' valuation expectations may also change with market conditions. Going public while investors are still willing to pay a high premium for rapid growth can help Anthropic secure more favorable financing terms.

Anthropic's revenue growth and profitability have already given it the confidence to aim for a trillion-dollar valuation. But whether it is actually worth $1.5 trillion or $2 trillion, the capital market still has disagreements.

The reason is simple: although Anthropic is earning more and more, whether this revenue can continue to grow and how much profit it can ultimately retain remain uncertain.

To clearly see this $500 billion valuation gap, the key still lies in three aspects.

First, cloud vendors contribute nearly half of revenue, but channel dependence may also squeeze Anthropic's profit margins.

In the first half of 2026, sales generated through the AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft cloud marketplaces accounted for about 48% of Anthropic's total revenue, compared with only about 11% in 2023.

Relying on cloud vendors' customer resources and sales networks, Anthropic can quickly enter the large enterprise market, but it also needs to pay corresponding channel fees. In the first half of 2026 alone, related expenses increased by about $2.7 billion year over year.

This means that Anthropic's revenue growth may not necessarily translate into profit growth proportionally. Cloud vendors bring customers and revenue, but they also take a share of the returns.

Therefore, investors cannot simply compare Anthropic's revenue scale with that of other AI companies; they also need to look at channel costs and actual profitability.

Ultimately, revenue growth determines the market's imaginative space, but how much profit can ultimately be retained is what determines whether a high valuation can hold.

Second, enterprise customer growth is rapid, but the stability of future revenue still needs to be tested.

In the first half of 2026, about 20% of Anthropic's revenue came from two customers, indicating that some large customers still have a significant impact on its revenue performance.

At the same time, many enterprise customers have not signed irrevocable long-term procurement contracts.

This means that even if Anthropic has entered the procurement systems of large enterprises, there is no guarantee that these customers will continue to increase procurement in the coming years.

Once customers switch to other models or begin using lower-cost open-source models, Anthropic's revenue may be affected.

Upstream costs have long-term rigidity, while downstream revenue carries fluctuation risk. This asymmetry is an important test for its valuation.

Third, the founding team controls more than half of the voting rights, and the actual say of public investors may be limited.

Under the proposed listing plan, Anthropic's seven co-founders hold one special Class F share through Founder LLC. Although this share does not carry ordinary economic rights, it controls 50.1% of the company's voting rights. In addition, a long-term interests trust also has the power to elect and remove a majority of the board of directors.

Simply put, even if Anthropic brings in a large number of public investors after going public, key decision-making power will still mainly remain in the hands of the founding team and related governance institutions.

Anthropic designed this to protect its long-term AI safety mission and avoid sacrificing technology research and safety goals to cater to short-term shareholder interests.

But the problem is that public investors put up money and bear business risks, yet may not obtain voting power corresponding to their shareholding ratio.

This may affect investors' valuation judgment of Anthropic. After all, investors care not only about how much money the company can make in the future, but also about whether they can influence major company decisions.

Therefore, although the special governance structure helps Anthropic adhere to its long-term goals, it may also become an obstacle in its bid for a high valuation of $2 trillion.

Overall, the valuation controversy surrounding Anthropic actually centers on three questions: how much profit can be retained from revenue, whether customers can continue to pay, and how much governance rights public shareholders can obtain.

Investors optimistic about Anthropic believe that its rapid growth and the market space for enterprise AI are enough to support a high valuation; cautious investors will set higher requirements regarding channel costs, revenue stability, and governance risks.

This is also the real test of Anthropic's IPO: it must not only prove that AI can create astonishing revenue, but also prove that this business can create returns for shareholders in a long-term, stable manner.

Anthropic's bid for the largest IPO in history shows the outside world the astonishing commercialization potential of frontier large models, and also exposes the huge costs required to support this growth.

For Anthropic, going public is only a new starting point. What it truly needs to prove is whether it can transform rapid growth into long-term, stable returns while continuing to invest huge amounts of capital.

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