Anthropic’s Road to a $2 Trillion IPO

According to recent reports by Reuters and leaked details from Anthropic’s confidential plans, the creator of the Claude LLM is preparing for a massive listing on the Nasdaq exchange. As a result, the company’s market capitalization could exceed $2 trillion.  

While there is massive hype among private investors, a closer look at the disclosed financial metrics for 2025 and early 2026 reveals that the company requires colossal investments. It is also creating a dangerous dependence on a few tech giants and imposing huge future obligations.  

Here is a brief analysis of Anthropic and its financial capabilities. Let's see whether there is a future for investing in this sector.  

Rapid Growth and Astonishing Losses

In 2025, Anthropic generated $4.59 billion in revenue, representing a massive 1,088% growth compared to $386 million in 2024. This momentum continued into the first quarter of 2026, with quarterly revenue already reaching $4.8 billion.  

However, the company's net loss is equally staggering, standing at $41.97 billion. To be fair, $34 billion of this sum consists purely of "paper" accounting expenses. This reflects changes in the valuation of future shares, meaning no actual cash is being deducted from the company's accounts. Yet, even if we discard these non-cash charges, the core deficit remains highly problematic. The company's operating loss widened to $8.06 billion in 2025, up from $2.98 billion in 2024. Therefore, we can conclude that Anthropic is spending cash significantly faster than it earns it.  

The Server Bill Trap

The weakest point in literally any AI company is the astronomical cost of server infrastructure. Anthropic essentially operates as a transit hub for money. All the capital collected from investors, venture funds, and clients is immediately redirected to pay for cloud infrastructure and servers.  

In 2025 alone, Anthropic spent $7.33 billion on computing power and infrastructure, a 190% increase compared to the previous year. Computing resources alone accounted for 58% of all operating expenses. To put this into perspective, it is 1.6 times higher than the company's total annual revenue.  

Furthermore, Reuters revealed exactly who Anthropic owes and how much it must pay for cloud services over the next 10 years. The breakdown includes Google at $111.1 billion, Amazon at $110 billion, and Microsoft at $31.4 billion. Companies like Broadcom, AMD, xAI, as well as a number of private funds and investors, are also mentioned. The total commitment stands at a staggering $518 billion, which is 25 times higher than Anthropic's total revenue for 2025.  

A striking detail is that these contracts have a "regardless of usage" and "non-cancelable" status. This means that even if the company does not need these computing capacities, it must pay anyway. If Anthropic uses less, it is obligated to compensate for the difference with real cash.  

To make matters worse, while Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are virtually the main investors in Anthropic, they also remain its primary competitors, developing their own successful AI models. In its prospectus, Anthropic openly warns investors that these tech giants pursue their own goals, which "may not align" with Anthropic’s interests. If they restrict access to computing power or revise the terms of cooperation, Anthropic's business could collapse instantly.

Vulnerabilities in Client Base and Control

Anthropic has other vulnerabilities as well. Nearly 24% of its 2025 revenue was generated by just two clients. If either of them stops using the services or decides to build their own internal models, a quarter of Anthropic's business could vanish overnight. The official statement also notes that the majority of large enterprise clients have not signed long-term contracts. Because the AI field is evolving at a breakneck pace, businesses can easily switch to competitors at any moment for instance, choosing cheaper or more powerful free alternatives.  

Anthropic is heading toward an IPO, but the founders plan to retain absolute power. Through a special entity called "Founder LLC," the seven creators of the startup will receive special shares guaranteeing them 50.1% of all voting power. 

Another major catch for investors is Anthropic's status as a Public Benefit Corporation. The startup bluntly warns that AI safety is more important to them than money. Consequently, their decisions may directly harm the financial profits of regular shareholders.  

Existential Risks to Humanity

Finally, they officially warn stock market investors that their product, Claude, could pose "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity, up to and including total extinction."  

By the way, I have previously written about AI risks to humanity in my articles "10% Chance of Doom? Why Insiders Are Fleeing OpenAI and Anthropic" and "Anthropic’s Apocalyptic Week: Inside the Secret Bio-Lab and the New AI Missile Crisis." Consider this a brief moment of self-promotion, but seriously, check out those materials where I describe these threats in much greater detail.

What conclusions can we draw from all of this? With $20.28 billion in cash and short-term investments on its balance sheet, Anthropic has a solid financial cushion. This money will certainly be enough to cover current operational costs.  

However, the $2 trillion valuation shows that investors are baking overly optimistic forecasts into the company's price. This sum relies heavily on bold expectations that Anthropic can scale its annualized revenue past the $100 billion mark between late 2026 and 2028.  

Since Anthropic will be the first major Generative AI company to hit the stock market, its performance will reveal the true sentiment of investors toward this sector. If Wall Street refuses to fund a company with such massive server liabilities, the entire AI industry could face the largest valuation correction in history.  

Thank you for reading