SAN FRANCISCO — Artificial intelligence company Anthropic publicly disclosed its financials for the first time, revealing staggering losses and rapidly growing revenue as it seeks to list on the stock market in what could be the largest-ever initial public offering.
Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot, lost $80 billion in the first half of 2026 as it poured its investment funding into training new AI models and securing access to data centers to run its chatbot and the coding agents it sells to businesses. The start-up’s revenue also grew at a staggering pace, from $1.16 billion in the first half of 2025 to $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, the company said in a Monday filing.
Anthropic and its rival OpenAI are among the fastest-growing businesses in history and have rocketed from small research-focused start-ups to being valued among the world’s largest companies in just a few years.
Both have received hundreds of billions of dollars of investment funding. And both have confidentially filed to go public, in part to raise the capital needed to continue their quest to build superintelligent AI that company leaders say will upend the economy, accelerate scientific progress and improve life for people around the world.
But not everyone is convinced. Some financial analysts have questioned the companies’ abilities to ever become profitable, given the huge costs involved in training AI and the close competition from open-weights AI models, which are nearly as capable as the high-end AI from Anthropic and OpenAI but are much cheaper to operate.
Anthropic’s public offering is seen as a bellwether for the entire AI industry and the immense bet laid by investors and major tech firms that the technology can be highly profitable.
If Anthropic’s valuation continues to climb, other companies including OpenAI probably will seek to go public soon as well. If the offering is met with a muted response, OpenAI and others probably would wait, and investors could reevaluate their view of other AI-related stocks.
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