Anthropic is expected to go public within weeks in a listing that could eclipse the record set by SpaceX’s Wall Street debut in June. The artificial intelligence company behind the Claude chatbot is heading for a potentially record-breaking initial public offering after rapid revenue growth, even as it carries enormous losses and a dispute with the Trump administration that could rattle investors. Wall Street, as ever, wants the upside first and the consequences later.
Capital Wants In, Costs Stay Hidden
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives who believed the potential risks posed by artificial intelligence were not being taken seriously enough. The company’s name means, somewhat paradoxically, “relating to human beings.” It is led by chief executive and co-founder Dario Amodei, a San Francisco native with a doctorate in biophysics from Princeton University, and his sister, Daniela, is also a co-founder and the company’s president. Anthropic has 5,000 employees, according to PitchBook. The human beings are in the branding. The capital is in the structure.
Until this year, Anthropic was widely seen as trailing OpenAI, which burst onto the scene with ChatGPT in November 2022 and triggered an AI arms race. Anthropic took a narrower route, focusing on artificial intelligence tools for software developers and businesses rather than chasing every shiny product in sight. That strategy has paid off spectacularly. Coding is one of the relatively few artificial intelligence services for which customers have proved willing to pay substantial sums. Claude Code, its assistant for developers, has become one of the company’s most popular products, helping push Anthropic’s annual revenue rate above $65bn (€55.6bn). Only a small proportion of ChatGPT users pay a subscription fee, while OpenAI has reportedly scaled back work on video generation and other projects.
The State Draws a Line
The momentum comes despite severe political headwinds. In March, the government terminated its contracts with Anthropic and designated the company a supply-chain risk after it refused to give the military unfettered access to its artificial intelligence models. Anthropic described the move as unconstitutional retaliation and launched legal action against the US government. The dispute could take years to resolve. The White House has also objected to Amodei’s repeated warnings about the dangers of artificial intelligence, including its potential impact on jobs, and his calls to regulate the technology in a similar way to airlines or banks. The state wants access. The company wants the market. Workers and everyone else are left to live with the fallout.
Amodei is also linked to effective altruism, a philosophy of targeted charitable giving scorned by conservatives in Silicon Valley and Washington. That detail sits neatly beside the rest of the story: a company built on vast computing power, massive infrastructure, and a political fight over who gets to command the machines. Like OpenAI, Anthropic requires enormous amounts of computing power and infrastructure to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence models and stay ahead of competitors, amid concerns that China could catch up. The race is framed as innovation. The bill is written elsewhere.
A Public Listing for Private Losses
Anthropic was valued at $965bn (€829bn) after raising $65bn (€55.8bn) in May. As the sums involved grow beyond the capacity of many venture-capital investors and sovereign wealth funds, a public listing would give Anthropic access to a much larger pool of capital. It would also expose the company to greater scrutiny over whether its vision for the artificial intelligence revolution can produce a sustainable business. OpenAI, after initially considering a listing this year, is now reportedly considering waiting until 2027.
According to Bloomberg, Anthropic aims to raise more than the $75bn (€64.3bn) secured by SpaceX in its record June IPO, excluding the over-allotment option exercised later. SpaceX, which absorbed Musk’s artificial intelligence start-up xAI before going public, made its listing a partial bet on artificial intelligence as well as space technology. Its shares skyrocketed initially before coming back down to earth, and now sit at about their $135 offering price. The market’s memory is short. The losses are not.
Anthropic’s investors will have to stomach huge losses for the foreseeable future. The company lost almost $42bn (€36bn) in 2025, according to US media reports, and is likely to continue burning through cash for years. To attract investors, Anthropic is expected to argue that it is targeting a total addressable market worth more than $30tn (€25.7tn), according to the Wall Street Journal. That refers to its estimate of the potential market available to the company, not its own expected revenue. In other words: the pitch is enormous, the losses are already here, and the public is being invited to underwrite the next round of the AI arms race.