Anthropic ‘lost $42bn in 2025’ IPO prospectus shows

Anthropic lost $42 billion in 2025, despite a 12-fold increase in revenue, according to Reuters, which has seen the company’s initial public offering (IPO) prospectus.

The news outlet said the AI developer believes that the technology will be more transformative to the global economy than industrialisation, electricity and the internet.

However, it faces a series of trials before this disruption is profitable. The company reported a net loss of $42 billion in 2025 and intends to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in coming years, Reuters reported.

Thirty-four billion of the losses resulted from an accounting charge reflecting an increase in share-based financing costs due to Anthropic’s growing valuation, leaving an operating loss of nearly $8 billion.

This is the first time that Anthropic’s real revenue has been available to the public, with the firm having previously reported ‘annualised revenue’ which multiplies the revenue from a month decided by Anthropic by 12.

Reuters did not report the company’s costs or revenue for 2026, but the prospectus reveals that the company brought in nearly $4.6 billion last year, a 12-fold increase from 2024. This appears to contradict a statement Anthropic made in May, when it reported generating $10 billion in 2025.

NTN has contacted Anthropic for a comment on the matter.

The company currently holds cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments totalling $20.28 billion as of December last year, Reuters reported, though this figure is prior to its $65 billion Series H raise in May.

Anthropic investors are hoping the company could be valued at around $2 trillion when it makes its stock market debut, more than double its own estimate of $965 billion from May. Given its current losses, this figure would be likely based on optimistic predictions of AI’s ability to transform the global economy, and the company’s leading role in the field.

However, as AI develops, fears around its abilities are rising concurrently. Both Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, and OpenAI head Sam Altman have called for slower AI development, citing security concerns.

Anthropic has doubled down on these warnings in its prospectus, Reuters reports, cautioning potential investors that AI could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity” and suggesting it could effectively perform sentience, exhibiting “self-preserving behaviours” including attempting to “resit shutdown”.

Anthropic’s largest outlay by far in 2025 was compute and infrastructure, which made up $7.33 billion of its $12.65 billion operating expenses last year. Training new AI models is the largest source of compute cost for frontier developers.

The industry has not uniformly agreed on the need to slow development. On Tuesday, Arthur Mensch, chief executive of French AI company Mistral, told CNBC that US AI companies were using the debate over AI safety as a cover for their own “negligence”, adding that it is necessary to make systems that can contain AI agents.

The prospectus also details the precarity of Anthropic’s current revenues. According to Reuters, nearly a quarter of its income came from two customers last year, and it warned in its risk factors section that many of its largest clients were not locked into long-term contracts and so could cut or stop spending.

On Monday, the Financial Times reported that businesses across the US were embracing cheaper Chinese models, which are often almost as powerful as their Western counterparts, over Anthropic or OpenAI’s offerings.

Reuters reported earlier in September that Anthropic was likely to push its IPO to after the US mid-term elections in November. The debut will be the second major test of investor appetite for AI companies, following SpaceX’s $75 billion raise in June, and the first large pure-play AI developer to enter public markets.

SpaceX’s $1.77 trillion valuation priced the company at an earnings multiple of around 90 times, far above what is common for technology stocks. Based on last year’s revenue, a $2 trillion valuation would see Anthropic trading at a multiple of around 434 times.