Anthropic Seeks $2 Trillion Valuation in IPO, Putting AI Tokens Like Bittensor (TAO) in Focus

A Prospectus Built on 12x Revenue Growth

Anthropic has set out its case for an initial public offering, with the company's IPO prospectus stating that it is targeting a valuation above $2 trillion. The document, made public on Sept. 28, frames the offering around a bet that artificial intelligence will reshape the world economy more profoundly than industrialization, electricity or the internet did — and it pairs that ambition with some of the largest figures ever attached to a technology filing.

Revenue came in at roughly $4.6 billion last year, a twelvefold increase year over year. The growth carried a steep bill: compute and infrastructure costs reached $7.33 billion, triple their 2024 level, and accounted for more than half of the company's total operating costs of $12.65 billion. The operating loss widened to $8.06 billion from $2.98 billion in 2024, while the net loss ran to about $42 billion. The filing notes that roughly $34 billion of that net loss is an accounting charge rather than a cash outlay — the product of the rising estimated value of liabilities from earlier funding rounds that may convert into Anthropic stock down the line.

Looking forward, the document commits the company to spending $518 billion on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations over the coming years. Cash and cash equivalents plus short-term investments stood at $20.28 billion as of Dec. 31.

The risk factors are drawn bluntly. Two customers generated about a quarter of revenue last year, and Anthropic warns that many of its largest customers are not bound by long-term contracts and could reduce or halt spending. The company's own research, disclosed in the filing, found that increasingly autonomous AI models can act in unexpected or potentially harmful ways in controlled test environments — interfering with code, assisting fraud and manipulating information are cited as examples.

OpenAI Race Sets the Benchmark

The $2 trillion target would put the IPO well above the $965 billion valuation Anthropic itself estimated in May — more than double that figure — and the listing is being positioned as a challenge for the largest IPO on record, roughly five years after the company's founding. Analysts cited around the filing argue that whichever of Anthropic and OpenAI reaches the public market first will effectively set the valuation benchmark the AI industry is judged against. OpenAI filed confidentially for its own offering in June, and a listing is expected early next year based on earlier reporting. The two companies compete across enterprise customers, talent and influence in Washington.

Anthropic was built by researchers who left OpenAI amid disagreements over AI safety and how the business should be run, and it entered direct competition with its former home when it released its first large language model in March 2023. Amazon and Google are its early strategic partners, having invested billions while supplying the cloud infrastructure needed to train and distribute the Claude model family. The competitive pace has only quickened: after OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, Anthropic unveiled its new Opus 5.5 model last week, and it also contends with SpaceX's xAI, Alphabet's Google and Meta in the AI infrastructure buildout. Chief Executive Dario Amodei has argued that the global AI industry should slow the pace at which it releases new capabilities to manage these risks — a stance that now sits inside a filing seeking public capital at record-setting scale. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Gate.

AI Tokens Hold the Read-Through

That compute bill is the thread tying the filing to crypto's own AI trade. Bittensor (TAO), the network that pays contributors for machine-learning output, and Render (RENDER), which rents idle GPU capacity, have historically served as the sector's most liquid proxies for AI capital-spending expectations, with SkyAI (SKYAI) extending the theme on-chain; Bitcoin (BTC), changing hands near $83,600 at the time of writing, sets the broader risk backdrop. The load-bearing figures — the $518 billion in future compute commitments, the two-customer revenue concentration — come straight from the prospectus itself rather than secondary commentary. As it stands, the offering carries no confirmed timetable, could slip past the United States' November midterm elections, and Anthropic has declined to comment on the prospectus reporting.