Anthropic reveals $80 billion loss, surging revenue as it prepares to go public

SAN FRANCISCO — Artificial intelligence company Anthropic publicly disclosed its financials for the first time, revealing staggering losses and rapidly growing revenue as it seeks to list on the stock market in what could be the largest-ever initial public offering.

Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot, lost $80 billion in the first half of 2026 as it poured its investment funding into training new AI models and securing access to data centers to run its chatbot and the coding agents it sells to businesses. The start-up’s revenue also grew at a staggering pace, from $1.16 billion in the first half of 2025 to $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, the company said in a Monday filing — a 14-fold increase.

Anthropic and its rival OpenAI are among the fastest-growing businesses in history and have rocketed from small research-focused start-ups to being valued among the world’s largest companies in just a few years. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI).

Both have received hundreds of billions of dollars of investment funding. And both have previously confidentially filed to go public, in part to raise the capital needed to continue their quest to build superintelligent AI that company leaders say will upend the economy, accelerate scientific progress, and improve life for people around the world.

“We believe that AI is one of the most consequential technologies in human history,” the company’s founders said in the prospectus. “Anthropic aims to realize these benefits while navigating and preventing the risks that come with a technological revolution this fast and powerful.”

But not everyone is convinced. Some financial analysts have questioned the companies’ abilities to ever become profitable, given the huge costs involved in training AI and the close competition from open-weights AI models, which are nearly as capable as the high-end AI from Anthropic and OpenAI but are much cheaper to operate.

In the filing, Anthropic attempted to square several assertions that observers have argued are contradictory. The company says it will translate accelerating AI capabilities into substantial returns for investors while mitigating the risks posed by such advanced AI. Because of its mission, Anthropic said, it might “forgo revenue, customers, or growth opportunities that a corporation managed solely to maximize stockholder value might pursue.”

The company said last week that it would donate 5% of the company to a public benefit fund, and its seven founders have separately said they will give 80% of their wealth to charitable causes.

Anthropic’s filing showed rapid revenue growth over the past year. Nearly three-quarters of its $4.6 billion in revenue in 2025 came in the last six months of the year. The company has also scaled its computing power and infrastructure costs, spending $9 billion on such expenses in the first half of 2026 alone — eclipsing the $7.3 billion it spent across all of 2025.

Anthropic said sustaining data centers and computing power will be crucial for ensuring it can continue to develop and deliver advanced AI.

“The pace of AI development is extremely rapid, with successive versions of models emerging in compressed timeframes, often measured in months rather than years,” the company said. “As a result, even a brief period without access to sufficient compute could cause us to fall behind quickly.”

The company’s prospectus also touches on the apparent risks of its own technology, including job displacement, aiding the development of biological weapons, or even catastrophic risks to humanity. The Post reported Monday that Anthropic itself was breached by researchers for a cybersecurity firm run by former members of the U.S. DOGE Service.

Anthropic also noted that its family of Claude models had become “one of the most powerful drivers of our progress — each new version of a Claude model directly accelerates development of the next.”

Anthropic’s public offering is seen as a bellwether for the entire AI industry and the immense bet laid by investors and major tech firms that the technology can be highly profitable.

If Anthropic’s valuation continues to climb, other companies including OpenAI probably will seek to go public soon as well. If the offering is met with a muted response, OpenAI and others probably would wait, and investors could reevaluate their view of other AI-related stocks.

The company plans to list on the Nasdaq stock exchange as “ANT.” The public offering, which analysts have previously said could go as high as $2 trillion, is expected to begin later next month.