Anthropic is heading towards a potential stock market debut that could value the Claude maker at more than $2 trillion, putting one of the biggest bets yet on the future economics of AI. The company’s IPO documents, however, show that this growth is coming with an equally massive cost.
The company generated nearly $4.6 billion in revenue in 2025, around 12 times its revenue a year earlier. At the same time, Anthropic reported a net loss of nearly $42 billion, while its operating loss widened to $8.06 billion from $2.98 billion in 2024.
The headline loss needs some context. Around $34 billion of the net loss came from an accounting charge linked to the increased estimated value of financing instruments that could eventually convert into Anthropic shares. That means the $42 billion figure does not represent $42 billion spent running the business, although Anthropic still recorded a substantial operating loss.
A major part of Anthropic’s spending is going towards the computing power needed to train and operate increasingly capable AI models. The company spent $7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure in 2025, nearly three times what it spent the previous year and more than half of its total operating expenses of $12.65 billion.
The bigger number sits further ahead. Anthropic has disclosed around $518 billion in future obligations tied to cloud services, computing capacity and infrastructure. The commitments show how much capital frontier AI companies may need to secure computing resources even before the returns from those investments become clear.
Anthropic had $20.28 billion in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments at the end of 2025. Its customer base also carries concentration risk: nearly a quarter of its 2025 revenue came from just two customers, while the company said several major customers were not locked into long-term contracts.
The proposed valuation reflects how quickly Anthropic’s private-market value has risen. Its May funding round valued the company at about $965 billion, meaning a valuation above $2 trillion would be more than double that level within months.
The IPO would also bring public-market investors directly into the AI spending race, which has so far been heavily supported by venture capital, sovereign wealth funds and technology companies. Amazon and Google are among Anthropic’s major strategic investors and also provide cloud infrastructure for Claude.
Anthropic is competing with companies including OpenAI, Google, Meta and xAI for customers, computing capacity and AI talent. Its potential listing therefore comes at a point when the AI industry is trying to turn rapidly expanding model usage into businesses capable of supporting the enormous infrastructure costs behind them.
