Anthropic Files for IPO After $42 Billion Loss. Who’s Paying $2 Trillion?

Anthropic has filed confidentially for an IPO, and Reuters has seen its prospectus. The 2025 numbers make for an awkward pitch: $4.6 billion in revenue, nearly $42 billion in net losses. A May funding round valued the company at $965 billion. The IPO could put it above $2 trillion. What has to happen for that price to make sense?

Start with the accounting. Roughly $34 billion of the net loss came from a noncash revaluation of financial instruments that could convert into shares. The headline loss is a lousy proxy for what it cost to run Claude. Strip out that charge, though, and Anthropic still posted an $8.06 billion operating loss. Compute and infrastructure spending reached $7.33 billion, triple the previous year’s figure.

Then there’s the bill still ahead. According to the prospectus reviewed by Reuters, Anthropic plans to spend $518 billion on cloud, compute and infrastructure obligations over the coming years. That is neither a single year’s expense nor, on the available evidence, a tally of contracts already signed. It is still an extraordinary amount of capacity to fund. More Claude sales mean more demand for compute; revenue growth alone says little about what will be left after paying for it.

Anthropic projects roughly $190 billion to $200 billion 2028 revenue, sources say

The $2 trillion case depends on a much bigger company arriving soon. Reuters reports that Anthropic projects $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028 revenue—more than 40 times its 2025 total. Sales are accelerating: its annualized revenue run rate topped $65 billion by the end of July 2026. That run rate extrapolates sales at a point in time; Anthropic has not booked $65 billion for the year. Even if it hits the 2028 forecast, a $2 trillion valuation would be about ten times annual revenue, with profitability still to prove.

Investors won’t get to see the 2028 results before buying in. On September 4, Reuters reported that IPO marketing was expected to start no earlier than mid-October, with a listing planned just before November’s U.S. midterm elections. By September 19, its sources said the offering might slip until after the vote. There is no firm date. Either way, the revenue underpinning the valuation remains a forecast roughly two years out.

For the math to work, Anthropic needs sales to keep soaring while compute costs grow much more slowly. Public investors would be buying that outcome in advance, with a widening operating loss and vast planned infrastructure spending already in view. Yesterday we wrote about early Anthropic employees looking at land in case AI goes badly wrong. IPO buyers might want a backup plot too. Their particular risk is laid out in the financials.