AI’s Game-Changing IPO

Well, it finally happened. The anthropic IPO, S-1 filing, now just hitting. Intends to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, A-N-T. The S-1 filing is a document submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which allows investors to look under the hood of a company. For the first time the public will really be able to analyze these company’s financials and just how much money they're not only making, but potentially losing. This is a critical moment for AI. It's a critical moment for the public markets. The most shocking thing is this is a company that's only six years old and wants to rewrite the history books for the largest IPO in human history. Anthropic is targeting to raise even more than SpaceX's IPO of $86.25 billion. And its valuation has shifted from $1.4 trillion to $1.5 trillion. The S-1 also shows that in the first six months of 2026, the company had $16.3 billion in revenue, but also net losses of $80.7 billion. In the same period last year revenue was $1.16 billion, with net losses of $13 billion. To put that into context, its revenue has jumped more than ten-fold in the last 12 months. But as that revenue has jumped, so have its costs. This is a company that needs to spend to compete. It is spending against some of the best capitalized companies in the world. And it's spending on compute power. Compute is kind of shorthand for the entire supply chain of what is needed to keep the lights on for AI, so to speak. Compute can mean the chips. Then there are the buildings and data centers around those chips that are made. Is electricity needed to power that whole data center? Here the numbers start to look a bit better. Anthropic’s compute and infrastructure spending was more than ten times the revenue in 2023, but in the first half of 2026, it fell to 55%. So for investors, the question is does this justify the $1.5 trillion or more valuation? The headline number is breathtaking. But when you look under the surface, this is a company that has grown faster than almost any company in history. And if some of this story sounds familiar, well, that's because it is. To better understand what might happen with Anthropic’s IPO we have to look back to June, when SpaceX broke records with its IPO. For a company with those kind of numbers to seek a valuation of $2 trillion. That is obviously pretty steep. Then just a few weeks later, the stock broke below issue price. It took a while for the company to then break back above that offer price. It has been volatile since. And just like SpaceX, the sheer size of Anthropic’s IPO will lend it outsized influence over indexes like the Nasdaq 100. What that means is for everyday people who have their retirement funds in the stock market, who are using this as their savings. They're also going to become now players in this AI market ecosystem. And this is why SpaceX's volatile debut is making some people nervous. The hard part about a bubble is you don't really know when the bubble is going to burst until it does. Not only is there this financial pressure for Anthropic to perform, but there are also these existential fears about is this going to kill us all? The company's prospectus has even flagged various risks to humanity, including attempts to resist shutdown, stressing that the technology needs to be developed with adequate safeguards and oversight. It's unclear if these existential risks will spook investors. So you have a whole set of pressures that the company is facing in this very public moment. So what's next for the AI industry as a whole? AI companies will take their cue from Anthropic. Both the Anthropic and OpenAI are in this fierce race with each other. Going first to market has real advantages, especially when you are defining a new industry. Sam Altman and his team are going to have to ask themselves, did they miss out on this moment? Or will they be happy that they waited? There's a lot of uncertainty around where their cash is ultimately going, and how they're trying to better position the business to last through the end of the decade and continue to grow. Once it goes public Anthropic, we'll have to start reporting on a quarterly basis. Once those books are open, you can't close them back up so easily. It's going to be interesting to see how Anthropic trades because that's going to reshape how we think about who the ultimate winners and losers will be.