It plans to spend $518 billion in the coming years on cloud, computing, and infrastructure obligations and now needs a lot of AI magic money.
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
Anthropic, which is targeting to go public at an IPO valuation of $2 trillion (trillion with a T), generated a net loss of $42 billion in 2025 on $4.6 billion in revenues, according to its IPO prospectus that was leaked to Reuters.
The net loss had multiplied by five from $8 billion in 2024. The revenues had multiplied by 12.
A quarter of its revenues came from just two customers, the company said, “and as part of its risk factors, warned that many of its largest clients were not locked into long-term contracts and could cut or stop spending,” according to Reuters.
Total operating expenses rose to $12.6 billion in 2025. This includes $7.3 billion in spending on compute and infrastructure, which had nearly tripled from $2.5 billion in 2024.
And the company plans to spend $518 billion in the coming years on cloud, computing, and infrastructure obligations, according to the prospectus cited by Reuters. So now it needs a lot of AI magic money; and at a valuation of $2 trillion, the IPO and any follow-on offerings would extract a lot of this AI magic money from investors.
“Excluding write-downs of various liabilities mostly tied to previous fundraising, according to the documents,” amounting to $34 billion, the company generated an operating loss of $8.1 billion, Reuters said.
The company isn’t going to run out of cash right away, despite the massive cash burn: At the end of 2025, the company sat on $20.3 billion in cash and short-term investments, according to the prospectus cited by Reuters. But that was before the massive $65 billion in Series H funding round in May 2026.
For the Series H funding round in May, the valuation of the company was set at $965 billion. The IPO valuation target of $2 trillion would more than double that. I mean, why not? It’s AI magic money.
“The [IPO] plans come as Anthropic confronts evidence from its own research that increasingly autonomous AI models can behave in unexpected and potentially harmful ways, including sabotaging code, assisting fraud and manipulating information in controlled tests,” Reuters said.
But there is a solution to that problem: Hold the executives and their companies legally responsible and accountable for creating and selling products that cause harm. These are not accidents; the products are doing what some of the smartest people around have designed them to do. AI is not a human-like creature. It is software that does what it is designed to do. The harm is not caused by human misusing the products. The harm is caused by the software on its own by the way it was designed.
Politicians of all stripes should condemn the efforts currently underway to create liability shields for these companies. And tort lawyers and prosecutors should be cranking up their machinery so that they’re ready when that harm occurs. That will encourage the AI companies and their executives to create products that are not inherently harmful on their own.
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