Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, filed for an initial public offering on Monday. According to reports, the offering could value the company at up to $2 trillion, potentially making it one of the largest stock market debuts in history. The registration statement was filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, although the company did not specify how many shares it intends to sell or at what price. Anthropic plans to list on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol ANT.
The IPO filing offers a detailed look at the company's finances. In the first half of 2026, Anthropic's revenue surged to $16.3 billion, while its net loss exceeded $80 billion, reaching approximately $80.7 billion. However, most of that loss was not caused by direct spending on computing infrastructure. About $72.4 billion stemmed from noncash accounting charges related to the revaluation of convertible financing instruments as the company's valuation rose. The cost of developing and operating AI models nevertheless remains enormous, with Anthropic spending nearly $9 billion on computing and infrastructure during the first six months of the year. In May, the company raised $65 billion from investors at a valuation of $965 billion.
Anthropic's Claude AI chatbot
(Photo: Stockinq / Shutterstock)
The IPO comes amid an unprecedented investment race. Meta, Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are pouring billions into efforts to dominate artificial intelligence. According to research firm Gartner, worldwide AI spending, including services, software and infrastructure, is expected to reach approximately $3.6 trillion in 2027, compared with $1.8 trillion in 2025.
OpenAI initially led the market following the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, but competition has intensified over the four years since. Claude Code, Anthropic's coding tool launched in early 2025, quickly became popular among developers. This year, the company sought to replicate that success in other office-based tasks with its Cowork agent. According to CNN, the tool helped accelerate the transition from chatbots to AI agents, unsettling software stocks amid fears that such technology could make other companies' products obsolete.
The figures reflect Anthropic's rapid growth. According to fintech company Ramp, 43.8% of U.S. businesses using its platform paid for Anthropic services in September, compared with 40.6% that paid for OpenAI. Research firm Sensor Tower estimates that the Claude app had more than 67 million monthly active users in the third quarter of 2026, up from 9.4 million a year earlier.
OpenAI has not stood still. In February, it launched its Codex coding app, followed in July by ChatGPT Work, an agent capable of carrying out multistep tasks such as preparing summaries and conducting analyses.
Alongside its commercial success, Anthropic has found itself at the center of a debate over the pace of artificial intelligence development. Last month, CEO Dario Amodei called on the industry to slow down to give safety research, standards and regulation time to catch up. Other senior figures in the industry have expressed similar views.
His essay was published after an employee resigned over concerns that artificial intelligence poses a threat to humanity, and amid reports from Anthropic and its competitors about AI models breaching other companies' systems during experiments.