Giant artificial intelligence Anthropic filed on Monday for what could be the largest initial public stock offering even as its top executives warned that advanced AI could threaten humanity.
The filing sets up the San Francisco company for a Wall Street launch next month, which could lead to SpaceX’s initial public offering in June that raised a record $86 billion. The Anthropic IPO will also put OpenAI’s leading company to go public in what is expected to be a pair of blockbuster stock launches for rival AI labs.
The IPO could provide Anthropic with enormous resources to accelerate its growth. The amount of money that the company has finally raised is still uncertain, like the final valuation and the offer price, but even if the estimate is low, it will make the five-year-old startup the most valuable company in the world and has the potential to increase the wealth of CEO Dario Amodei and his sister and founder, Daniela, billions of dollars.
Yes 335 page document It shows that Anthropic’s revenue is growing rapidly, reaching more than 16 billion dollars in the first half of the year, which is 14 times the revenue from the same period last year. But like many other tech companies going public, the company behind the Claude chatbot has yet to make a profit.
Despite the loss, Anthropic, valued at the beginning of this year at $ 965 billion by private investors, is expected to see that value increase to $ 1.5 trillion or possibly $ 2 trillion, although its final valuation has not been established. At $1.5 trillion, Anthropic would rank as the world’s most valuable public company, alongside Tesla.
For increased funding, the proposal could bring in up to $100 billion, according to reports, surpassing the record set by SpaceX.
In a regulatory filing, Anthropic said it will list its stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol “ANT.”
The Wall Street launch is planned in a shaky market
In the filing, the company said it could use some of the money to buy other businesses and technologies as well as invest in infrastructure to expand its business to take on competitors.
Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI leaders, Anthropic is locked in a battle for dominance in that company. The two leaders, Amodei and CEO Sam Altman of OpenAI, are seen as bitter rivals.
But they have many other competitors, including Google, a startup in the US and China and SpaceX, which has an AI business. The AI divisions of Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX all lost more money than they made because of the huge cost of resources to create AI, raising concerns of a bubble.
The need for cash may explain why Anthropic is rushing to the public market this year, and not waiting until next year, according to OpenAI’s plan. Adding to the pressure is the possibility demand for AI stocks could decline, or even collapse. Investors have become nervous about the sector’s huge financing needs, and several tech companies have recently pulled IPO plans.
In addition to helping with the cash crunch, the IPO will create extraordinary wealth for Anthropic’s seven founders, including Amodei and his sister. The filing did not directly state their ownership stakes, but other figures released indicated that each would end up with 1.4% of the company, a loss of up to $28 billion each if the company went public at its expected maximum value.
A lot of risk, but a big payoff for the founder
Dario, 43, and Daniela, 39, president of Anthropic, are worth $15.5 billion each, according to Forbes, which ranks them 176th and 177th in the world.
Anthropic reported a net loss of $80.7 billion in the first half of 2026, although it included a one-time charge of $72.4 billion for accounting adjustments related to financial contracts, according to the filing. In the same period last year, Anthropic lost $13 billion.
Reflecting the dangers of AI, the document contains some unusual provisions, including giving those two and their five other co-founders 50.1% of the voting rights of shareholders through a special group of shares. Anthropic also appointed an independent, financially disinterested member of the so-called Long-Term Benefit Trust, holding the power to appoint directors, which is designed to ensure that the company does not put financial interests before public safety.
Another unusual feature of the filing is a long list of “risk factors”, disclosure required for all public companies, but in this case there are almost 100 pages – and make riveting reading.
Among the risks are quotidian — the possibility that it will not be able to keep important staff or navigating regulatory obstacles — and scary. The latter includes the prospect of “malicious actors” using AI models to create chemical weapons, regimes turning to the technology to subjugate their citizens and the possibility that AI models can be deceptive and “cause disasters or existential risks to humanity.”
Ask the AI to slow down
Anthropic and other leading companies touted the technology’s potential to cure disease and accelerate economic growth. But it also threatens to disrupt important jobs by reducing the demand for human labor.
Incidents of hacking by rogue AI agents have also fueled fears that technology will reduce human control to perform dangerous, life-threatening tasks.
In September, Amodei said the AI industry should slow its rapid development to give security measures time to catch up. Without such a slowdown, Amodei warns AI could release agents that could take over the entire Internet within six to 12 months.
He proposed a plan in a post on his website to increase industry scrutiny, noting that Anthropic is doing some of this on its own. For other steps, though, he said it would require coordination across the industry and with governments around the world, including dictators.
Conflict with the US government
Anthropic has tried to distinguish itself from other AI companies as the “good guys”, focusing on security and responsible development as opposed to growth at all costs. Some of this sentiment comes from the company’s dispute with the US government, which occurred in February, when President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth accused Anthropic of being a threat to national security and identified the company as a risk to the supply chain.
Anthropic sued the Pentagon over supply chain risk identification in March for what it called “unlawful retaliation” against its refusal to allow unrestricted use of military technology. The legal challenge has intensified unusual public debate about how AI could be used in warfare and mass surveillance.
ChatGPT maker OpenAI made its own deal to work with the Pentagon hours after the government sanctioned Anthropic for its stance. Anthropic also filed a separate and narrower case involving a different rule that the Pentagon is using to try to declare Anthropic a supply chain risk.
A California judge ruled in Anthropic’s first case and a Washington, D.C. judge sided with the government in the second case. Both parties are appealing the decision.
