Anthropic Losses Top $80.7bn Ahead of Record Nasdaq Listing

By Olivia Hart

Anthropic lost more than $80.7bn (£60.5bn) in the first six months of this year — and it still expects to stage the largest stock market debut in history. The company behind the Claude chatbot disclosed the figure in new filings published ahead of its planned share sale, alongside revenue of $16.3bn for the same period. That is a burn rate of roughly $10.8bn a month before any of the costs of going public.

The number of shares to be released and their price range remain undetermined, according to the filing. Investors are being asked to underwrite a company whose valuation is expected to exceed SpaceX's, which set the record for the biggest-ever listing this summer at an initial valuation of about $1.8 trillion. No company has ever gone public at that scale. The takeaway: this is a debut priced on belief in AI's future, not on current financials.

What did Anthropic tell investors?

Anthropic said it will often make forward investments "that may seem irresponsibly large at first glance". The company framed this as strategy, not recklessness.

"In order to fully capture the opportunity in front of us, we need to invest more aggressively than would a business that operates in a more slowly changing technological regime," the firm said.

"In general, we will aim to be bold but sane, and to win trust with a track record of successful bets."

That track record does not yet exist as a public company. The filing language invites investors to accept losses as evidence of ambition. Read plainly, the pitch is: trust us with your capital while we spend it faster than any listing in history.

Anthropic will list on the Nasdaq under the symbol ANT. It will be the first true AI company to go public, which makes the debut a test for the entire technology sector's valuation story.

How big is the spending wave behind it?

Tech companies have poured more than $1tn into AI infrastructure over the last year alone — data centres and the informational models that underlie all AI technology. Anthropic's losses sit inside that flood of capital expenditure. Spread across the industry, the figure works out to unprecedented per-quarter investment in physical computing capacity. Whether that spend produces returns is the question the listing will effectively put to the market.

Who is behind the company?

Anthropic was founded just five years ago by chief executive Dario Amodei, his sister Daniela Amodei and five other co-founders. The company announced its intention to go public in June. Its most significant rival, OpenAI, quickly followed suit and said it also intended to list. That offering is now expected early next year, according to a person familiar with OpenAI's plans.

The sibling-founded, five-year-old company is thus moving from startup to public markets in less time than most firms take to reach profitability. The speed itself is part of the story investors must price.

What risks did the filing acknowledge?

After both companies announced their listing plans, a wave of cyber-security and other technological breaches occurred involving their AI agents — bots designed to operate somewhat autonomously. Current and former staff of both companies have also drawn public attention with warnings that AI is being developed without the ability to protect humanity from possible future harms enacted by AI tools.

Anthropic's documents do not dismiss this. The company reiterated past promises to develop AI in a way that is beneficial to people, while at the same time warning investors of its dangers. A safety pledge and a risk disclosure in the same filing is unusual candour; it also means buyers cannot claim they were not told.

Notably absent from the disclosures so far: the share count, the price range and any timeline for reaching profitability. Until those appear, the record-setting valuation remains an expectation, not a fact. If the SpaceX benchmark holds, Anthropic's debut will define how public markets value AI itself — losses and all.