Anthropic’s Risky IPO

It appears that Anthropic’s S-1 filing to go public was leaked yesterday, giving us additional insight into the company and its planned IPO.

The fact that Anthropic hasn’t withdrawn its IPO prospectus and that this information has been made public suggests that Anthropic is moving forward with its IPO this fall.

That’s despite all of its mischievous activity and push to slow the entire industry down through regulatory capture.

Its financial numbers for 2025 aren’t very surprising given the tear that Anthropic has been on building frontier AI models as quickly as it can.

The one oddity that really pops out is the $34 billion difference between the operating loss and the net loss. This is a $34 billion accounting charge to account for the estimated value of some of its past financing that could be converted into Anthropic shares. This indicates that it was some form of convertible debt, so it has nothing to do with past or future operations.

Far more important than what happened last year is what is happening this year…

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Anthropic Isn’t Slowing Down

Anthropic’s revenue growth for the first half of this year is impressive.  Q2 came in at $11.5 billion, up from $4.73 billion in Q1.  And Anthropic notes that it is profitable on an operating basis for the second quarter in a row.

Now, that doesn’t say much or mean much given that Anthropic is burning through billions of dollars a quarter in this race to superintelligence.

Despite its very well-orchestrated, well-funded, and well-planned efforts to scare everyone regarding the existential threats of AI, the information leaked from the S-1 certainly doesn’t indicate that the company is slowing down at all.

In fact, included in the data are details on the company’s committed plans to spend $518 billion on future cloud services and data centers. Half a trillion dollars!?!

To put things in perspective, Anthropic raised $30 billion in February this year at a $380 billion valuation, and an additional $65 billion this May at a $965 billion valuation.

Combined with the $20.28 billion it started the year with, that’s a total of $115.28 billion, less whatever the company burned through during the first two quarters of the year.

Just using some back-of-the-envelope calculations using the same operating margins from 2025, Anthropic may have spent as much as $46 billion on operating expenses in the first half of this year. That would imply that it has about $69 billion remaining for the second half of 2026.

That may sound like a lot, but as Anthropic’s revenues are scaling so quickly, so are its operating expenses. The reality is that the company probably has enough to get through the end of the year, and maybe just enough to get through the first quarter of 2027, but after that, there won’t be anything left.

Hence the need for the IPO. Anthropic will soon need a large injection of capital to keep the growth going through 2027 and avoid bankruptcy, for that matter.

Another Historic IPO

Its valuation growth has been extraordinary. Its September 2025 $13 billion venture round happened at a $170 billion pre-money valuation. And this May’s raise took place at a $965 billion post-money valuation.

That’s a 5.7X increase in valuation for a company of this size in the span of just one year. Incredible.

Even more unbelievable is that the S-1 indicates that the IPO will take place potentially above $2 trillion. Needless to say, that would make it the most valuable IPO in history, overtaking the SpaceX (SPCX) IPO at $1.77 trillion this June.

These numbers are hard to believe, even more so considering Anthropic was founded just recently in 2021.

With that said, Anthropic is expected to be at a $100-120 billion annualized run rate by the end of this year. Aggressive analysts might extrapolate those numbers and suggest that Anthropic might hit a $200 billion run rate by the end of 2027.

If that happened, it would likely imply that a $2 trillion valuation at IPO would represent a valuation somewhere between 10-15 times annual 2027 sales. That’s rich, but not unthinkable given what’s happening in AI.

But those aggressive forecasts don’t make much sense.

As we’ve learned, open-weight and open-source models from China and here in the U.S. are now performing almost at the levels of the frontier models. And the rate of improvement of those models is just as quick as the rate of improvement of the frontier models.

And the advantage, of course, is that these open-weight models can be run for a small fraction of the cost of the frontier models.

That means that Anthropic will not be able to maintain its current margins and will be forced to drop its prices.  The same is, of course, true for OpenAI that recently pushed its plans for an IPO into early 2027.

Not Worth the Risk

Beware of the Anthropic IPO.

One third of the prospectus is dedicated to AI doomerism and the “existential risks to humanity.”

Such an odd way to message to prospective investors, and clearly an attempt to over-index on full disclosures in an effort to reduce its future liabilities.

Venture capital and private equity investors, not to mention all of the power-hungry people behind effective altruism, want the IPO so that they gain liquidity and take as much money off the table as possible.

They know what’s coming, and if they wait too long, Anthropic’s gig could be up, and its value as a private company could collapse.

Don’t get caught in their trap.

Jeff