Anthropic opens its books to a select group of institutional investors in San Francisco on Wednesday, presenting third-quarter financials in advance of a listing that people familiar with the matter have told Bloomberg could price the company at between $1.8 trillion and $2 trillion. Formal IPO marketing could begin the week of November 9, with trading reportedly starting before Thanksgiving. A confidential draft S-1 was submitted to the SEC on June 1; as of October 11, FinanceFeeds reported, no public version had appeared on EDGAR.

The numbers investors will be shown are extraordinary in both directions. Yahoo Finance has reported 2025 revenue of roughly $4.6 billion, up from $386 million the year before, with annualized revenue reportedly hitting $65 billion by July 2026. Anthropic also posted an operating loss above $8 billion in 2025 and only turned positive on an adjusted operating income basis in the second quarter of this year.

Set against that revenue line is a liability stack unusual even by hyperscaler standards: approximately $518 billion in future cloud, computing, and infrastructure obligations, nearly all of them non-cancellable. The components disclosed include a $15 billion annual arrangement tied to SpaceX’s Colossus 1, a $44.6 billion cloud deal with Nscale, and a Broadcom lending facility of up to $42 billion for chip leasing. Two unnamed customers accounted for roughly a quarter of 2025 revenue, and many large accounts, Yahoo Finance notes, operate without long-term contracts.

The prospectus itself tells the story. Nearly a third of its pages are devoted to risk factors, including language warning that AI could pose “catastrophic or existential” dangers. That isn’t boilerplate. It’s the company telegraphing to public-market investors that the business they’re buying is structurally fragile at the exact moment it’s being priced at a two-trillion-dollar peak.

What follows an IPO of this shape is historically legible. Public shareholders demand margin expansion, and the pressure travels downstream: API repricing, enterprise-tier gating, feature consolidation. Small businesses that have quietly wired Claude-powered tools into their outreach and content stacks are counterparties to a cost structure they didn’t negotiate. The investor day is in San Francisco. The bill arrives everywhere else.

Sources