In late 2020, a group of senior OpenAI employees unhappy with what they saw as the company’s failure to adequately prioritize AI ethics and safety left the firm to form Anthropic PBC. Just a few years later, the younger company has become an artificial intelligence behemoth that is expected to hold one of the largest and most closely watched initial public offerings in history.
Anthropic filed publicly on Oct. 26 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO, in a document disclosing its financial details and strategic plans. The maker of the Claude chatbot is expected to list its shares on Nasdaq in November.
The company is going forward with its planned IPO despite what has become a fraught moment for the AI sector. In recent months, multiple incidents in which AI models went rogue and attacked other organizations intensified fears about the technology’s potential capacity to escape human control.
At the same time, AI companies including Anthropic have seen growth start to slow, even as the businesses generate massive revenue.
How has Anthropic become such a richly valued and influential company so quickly?
Although it’s a relatively young company, it quickly became central to the AI boom with its flagship Claude chatbot. Anthropic has since seen revenue skyrocket from Claude Code, a system geared toward business users. Claude Code, which is designed to streamline the process of writing and debugging code, took off among software developers in a lucrative early market for AI services.
At the same time, the company has largely abstained from flashy AI offerings such as video generators that created buzz for rivals like OpenAI but also proved very cost-intensive.
Anthropic also worked to build on its early success by branching into a wider mix of industries, including legal and financial services. Earlier in 2026, it unveiled Claude Cowork, a general-purpose AI agent designed to tackle a broader set of professional tasks. More recently, the firm has developed models with advanced cybersecurity capabilities.
What do we know about Anthropic’s finances?
Anthropic’s filing disclosed limited information about the company’s finances. Notably, Anthropic didn’t provide a target figure for how much it aims to raise in the public offering or how many shares it would sell. Anthropic plans to reveal those figures closer to the public listing.
Wall Street will be watching closely to see whether Anthropic anticipates raising more than the record-setting $86.2 billion that Elon Musk’s SpaceX took in during its June public offering. Some investors expect the IPO will value Anthropic at between $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion.
Anthropic is raking in money from sales of its AI software to business customers, recording revenue of $16.3 billion in the first six months of 2026 versus $1.2 billion in the same period in 2025. But the size of its losses are surging as the company spends huge sums to fuel its AI work. Anthropic had a net loss of $80.7 billion in the first half of 2026 compared with a $13 billion net loss in the same period in 2025, the filing shows.
Still, the company was generating positive operating cash flow in the first six months of 2026, giving investors greater confidence that the business has the potential to make money in the long term.
Why would Anthropic want to go public now?
There is expected to be heavy demand for the shares, and Anthropic will be eager to raise as much money as it can to power its operations. Its entry to the public markets will open the door for cheaper — and quicker — debt and equity financing to fund its cash-needy data centers.
For Anthropic, a sense of rivalry with its old competitor, OpenAI, likely came into play, since the company that goes public first might be perceived on Wall Street to be ahead in the AI race.
Anthropic is taking the plunge in public markets despite growing fears that humans are in danger of losing their grip on AI. In its IPO paperwork, Anthropic warned that AI posed “catastrophic, existential risks to humanity” if its technologies aren’t developed with adequate safeguards and oversight.
Anthropic’s chief executive officer, Dario Amodei, previously called for an industrywide slowdown in AI development. In a 3,800-word essay published in September, Amodei said development of the most advanced systems must be slowed in order to prevent AI from slipping beyond human control.
But if Anthropic is to have a successful IPO, it will need to find a way to continue advancing AI technology while mitigating its dangers.
Is the popular backlash against AI expected to affect Anthropic’s business?
It might. In the filing, Anthropic said the public climate around AI could harm the company’s reputation and increase its costs. “Many of the risks we face are interconnected and may compound or trigger cascading adverse effects across our business, which could amplify their overall impact.”
Are there downsides to becoming a public company?
One major trade-off of going public is that a company faces much more financial scrutiny and pressure for nearer-term returns than it had as a private firm. All its financials will need to be publicly reported, and the company will be required to report quarterly earnings and face questions from Wall Street analysts.
There also is the volatility that comes with having a closely watched share price that moves on any bit of incremental news.
Another risk Anthropic noted is that the IPO will create a financial windfall for early and longer-tenured employees who might then be less motivated to remain at the company. In addition, heightened attention to AI has increased threats to employees’ physical and informational security, the company disclosed, developments that could affect recruitment and morale.
What risks would investors be taking?
The key risk for IPO buyers is if expectations around AI’s profit potential turn out to have been too high. It’s also unclear how much more room there is to grow for firms such as Anthropic and OpenAI that are expected to hit the public market after having achieved extraordinary private valuations. And both companies face intensifying competition from Chinese AI companies as well as from Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Meta Platforms Inc. That’s a marked shift from earlier mega-IPOs such as that of Google or Meta’s precursor, Facebook, which were the dominant players in their niches when they went public.
How is Anthropic planning to use super-voting shares?
Anthropic plans to give Amodei and the six other co-founders super-voting shares — shares with extra voting power — that will allow the group to maintain voting control of the company. The share structure has become common in the tech industry and is designed to ensure founders have greater say over the direction of their company.
What might it mean for the IPO that Anthropic is a public benefit corporation?
As part of its endorsement of ethics in AI, Anthropic is structured as a public benefit corporation, or PBC. That designation, a legally recognized status in more than 30 US states, means that a profit-making entity is expected to balance shareholder interests with making a positive impact on society.
The IPO would add Anthropic to a tiny group of PBCs, including eyewear company Warby Parker Inc., footwear maker Allbirds Inc. and education company Coursera Inc., that have sold shares to the public.
Experts in corporate governance say that status is unlikely to affect the pricing of Anthropic’s IPO, since the company still has wide latitude to pursue profits. But other governance issues might have a bigger influence, they said. Anthropic created a long-term public benefit trust, an oversight body meant to keep the company accountable to its public mission. The trust is independent from shareholders, raising the possibility that directors will make decisions that investors dislike. That might prompt shareholders to expect a discount in the IPO share price, said Jesse Fried, a Harvard Law School professor who studies corporate governance.
This report is auto generated from the Bloomberg news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.