Anthropic unveiled its US IPO filing on Monday, setting out its ambitions to build AI systems capable of transforming the global economy while confronting the costs and challenges of developing the technology.
The prospectus highlights Anthropic’s rapid growth over the past year, fuelled by Big Tech’s breakneck spending, which has driven a rally in AI stocks while raising concerns about lofty valuations and rising debt.
The listing is expected to establish Anthropic, the AI lab behind the viral Claude models, as a benchmark for how Wall Street values leading AI companies, including rival OpenAI.
Anthropic is pressing ahead with its IPO plans even as a once-busy listing calendar has thinned out, with market volatility prompting companies to delay offerings. The IPO would give Anthropic access to a deep pool of capital to fund its costly AI ambitions, which require heavy investment in computing infrastructure to develop and operate sophisticated models.
Global equities have sold off sharply as investors grow uneasy with the debt-fuelled AI investment boom and start to doubt whether the trillions being poured into data centres, chips and computing capacity will generate returns fast enough to support lofty valuations. Higher borrowing costs and rising bond yields have added to their caution.
Some current and prospective investors are valuing Anthropic at about US$1.5-trillion, down from roughly $2-trillion a week ago, after the AI start-up disclosed some financial details at a recent investor event.
Safety concerns
The IPO comes as Anthropic’s own research raises concerns about advanced AI systems, which in controlled tests have shown behaviours including code sabotage, fraud assistance and information manipulation. Those findings have fuelled concerns about how companies can keep increasingly powerful AI systems under control as they race to deploy them commercially.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called on the global AI community to slow the release of new capabilities to address those risks. The company has since released its Opus 5.5 model, seeking to keep pace with ChatGPT maker OpenAI after the launch of its GPT-6 Astra model.
Anthropic, founded in 2021 by a team of researchers, was valued at $965-billion in May in a funding round that drew some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street.
Amazon and Google were among Anthropic’s early strategic partners, investing billions of dollars in the start-up while providing the cloud infrastructure needed to train and deploy Claude models.
Anthropic remains locked in a fierce battle with OpenAI to build the most advanced AI systems. OpenAI confidentially filed for an IPO in June and is expected to list by early 2027.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in September that the company would not go public this year. He cited AI safety concerns, describing even a 10% risk of AI causing human extinction by the end of the decade as “unacceptable”.
Anthropic’s IPO follows that of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which rewrote the IPO record books in June when it priced a $75-billion offering that valued the company at $1.75-trillion. – Manya Saini and Echo Wang, (c) 2026 Reuters
