Anthropic files for potentially record-breaking stock market debut

AI giant Anthropic has filed papers for what could become one of the largest stock market debuts in history.

In its filing on Monday the company behind Claude AI not only detailed its surging business growth, but also shared a warning of the potential “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity” posed by artificial intelligence.

Anthropic’s filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission sets the stage for the company to go public and begin trading on the stock market as soon as November 16.

The initial public offering (IPO) – the process of selling a company’s stock to the public for the first time – could reportedly value Anthropic at up to $2 trillion (around £1.5 trillion).

This would make Anthropic one of the largest public companies in the world.

If all goes ahead as planned, the company’s stock will trade under the ticker ANT and will be listed on the Nasdaq exchange.

The San Francisco-based company did not disclose how many shares it intends to sell nor at what price. That information will be determined in the coming weeks ahead of the stock market debut.

In the filing, Anthropic’s founders penned a letter to potential shareholders laying out their vision for the value of AI, while also disclosing what they see as the major risks for the business.

Those risks include everything from competition from other AI labs to “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.”

The IPO filing offers insight into how Anthropic views the future of its business despite those concerns and uncertainties.

Anthropic’s revenue grew 1,300% year-on-year in the first six months of 2026, to $16.3 billion (around £12.2 billion), the company says.

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Its business is largely dependent on companies using its Claude AI system, revealing that it has more than 14,000 enterprise customers, approximately 250 of whom contribute $10 million (around £7.5 million) or more in annual revenue.

Despite its rapid growth, the company reported an overall net loss of over $80 billion (around £59.9 billion), according to the SEC filing.

Still, just shy of $9 billion (around £6.7 billion) of that loss was due to spending on AI infrastructure and computing, while more than $72 billion (around £54 billion) was attributable to a change in fair value of some of the firm’s financial instruments.

That means only a fraction of the loss was actual spending during the first half of the year.

The company did not include results for the most recent financial quarter, which ended on September 30.

Anthropic’s IPO will test Wall Street’s appetite for AI, as the general public, policymakers and the industry’s own technologists raise major questions about the risks posed by artificial intelligence.

The filing also addresses many of the same themes that have sparked concerns of an AI bubble, including the possibility of AI demand growing more slowly than expected.

Anthropic was last valued at $965 billion (around £723 billion) after raising $65 billion (around £48.7 billion) from investors in May.

Anthropic’s decision to move forward with its IPO signals “a willingness to face heightened public scrutiny,” said Jacob Bourne, an analyst with Emarketer.

He added that the IPO filing “comes at a pivotal moment for the AI industry” amid rising concerns over debt-fuelled infrastructure investments, uncertain returns, and safety risks that have reportedly contributed to Chat-GPT creator OpenAI delaying its own IPO until next year.

What dangers of AI has Anthropic warned about?

Anthropic’s filing lays out four major categories of risk from artificial intelligence: misuse, such as being used to design and implement bioweapons or cyberattacks; loss of human control; authoritarian abuse, such as its potential use to create surveillance states; and economic disruption.

The filing includes 93 pages of risk factors for Anthropic’s business. That’s significantly more than other tech companies that have filed to go public over the last decade, like Snap, which had around 30 pages of risk factors, and Uber, which had about 50.

If Anthropic’s models cause extreme harm, the company could face liability exceeding what its insurance can cover, the filing states.

The company also said its AI models may behave in unintended or “misaligned” ways and may take “harmful actions that no user or third party directed”.

Anthropic sought to reassure potential investors by writing that it believes “frontier AI companies must invest in safety and alignment to help ensure the responsible diffusion of this technology”.

However, the company could face conflicting pressures to balance safety versus returns for investors once it goes public.

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Anthropic sees a wave of other potential risks to its business in other areas as well, from whether it’s able to secure enough computing resources to uncertain regulatory and political environments.

It also said much of its revenue relies on a limited number of products and customers.

In September Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for an industry-wide slowdown to allow time for safety research, industry standards and regulation to catch up, a sentiment echoed by some other top AI leaders.

Among those to join calls for concern was Microsoft President Brad Smith, who told ITV News in October that AI is currently less regulated than washing machine or cartons of milk and said, “the time to act is now”.

His essay came after an employee resigned over fears that AI could pose a threat to humanity, and follows reports from Anthropic and its rivals of AI models hacking into other companies during testing.

Mr Amodei was one of several AI CEOs who met with US President Donald Trump in September and signed a voluntary commitment to self-police AI models.

Anthropic’s relationship with the White House has not always been smooth, however, with the company temporarily revoking all access to its most capable models when the Trump administration ordered it to prevent foreign nationals from using the technology in June.

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