Anthropic files to list on stock market in potential $US1.5tn float

In short: Anthropic, the AI giant behind Claude, could be floated on the Nasdaq as soon as next month, despite making a $US80 billion ($114 billion) loss in the first half of 2026. The company has flagged the potential harm its AI models could pose to humankind. The company could be valued at up to $US1.5 trillion, investors say. Anthropic has disclosed steep losses and red-hot revenue growth in its US initial public offering filing, as the Claude-parent laid out its ambition to build AI systems capable of reshaping the global economy despite the high costs of developing the technology. The prospectus highlights the AI company's rapid growth over the past year, fuelled by Big Tech's breakneck spending that has driven a rally in AI stocks while raising concerns about lofty valuations and rising debt. The company also flagged growing risks from AI technology, underscoring concerns over its potential to cause harm which had led chief executive Dario Amodei to call for a slowdown in development of advanced models. Anthropic's net loss in the first half of 2026 widened sharply to $US80.7 billion ($114 billion), largely due to a rise in the fair value of bonds convertible into company's shares. Revenue in this period stood at about $US16.3 billion. The company's revenue grew a staggering 1,368 per cent in the three months ending June 30 from a year ago, but warned in the prospectus that revenue growth rate could decline over time and fluctuate from time to time. The IPO, which is likely to be as early as later this month, 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. The IPO push comes despite a once-busy fall listing calendar thinning out as choppy markets prompt companies to delay their offerings. Analysts said that would give Anthropic access to a deep pool of capital to fund its costly AI ambitions. Growing investor uneasy with the debt-fuelled AI investment boom has led to a global sell-off in AI and tech stocks as they start to doubt if the trillions spent on data centres, chips and computing capacity will generate fast returns to support lofty valuations. Investors assess Anthropic's value Some current and prospective investors are valuing Anthropic at about $USUS1.5 trillion. Anthropic said more than half of Fortune 500 companies and over 30 per cent of Global 2000 firms were customers generating at least $US100,000 each in revenue for the company over the 12 months ended September 30. 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. The findings have fuelled concerns about how companies can keep powerful AI systems under control as they race to deploy them commercially. The prospectus also highlighted risks associated with its AI models, which it said could exhibit "self-preserving behaviours", including behaviour "resembling blackmail". "Our increasing use of AI systems to accelerate our own research and development may cause the capabilities of our models to advance more rapidly than our ability to develop, validate, and implement corresponding safety, alignment, and security measures," it said. Anthropic will trade on the Nasdaq after the IPO closes under the ticker symbol "ANT". The filing did not reveal the terms of its offering, including the number of shares it plans to sell and the proposed price range. Red hot growth predicted Anthropic, founded in 2021 by a team of researchers, was valued at $US965 billion in May in a funding round that drew some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley and Wall Street. "We believe this abundance of AI will rapidly transform every sector of the global economy in ways greater than the impact of industrialisation, electricity, semiconductors and the internet," the prospectus said. The company said it expects compute and infrastructure expenses to increase in absolute dollars and remain its largest operating expense for the foreseeable future. Anthropic remains locked in a fierce battle with OpenAI to lead the race to build the most advanced AI systems. The ChatGPT maker confidentially filed for an IPO in June and is expected to list by early 2027. Anthropic's IPO follows that of Elon Musk's SpaceX, which rewrote the IPO record books in June, when it priced a $US75 billion offering that valued the company at $US1.75 trillion. Reuters