Anthropic's IPO: unprecedented growth and an $80.7B loss — the question is how to read the prospectus

By Yahoo Finance · October 28, 2026.

Anthropic's IPO prospectus (Form S-1) is now being read across Wall Street. According to the filing, revenue for the first half of 2026 came to $16.3 billion, up from $1.1 billion a year earlier. That is a jump of roughly 1,300% year over year, a figure that Shiv Verma, chief financial officer of Robinhood, says he does not recall seeing at any other company.

The same prospectus reports a net loss of $80.7 billion for the half. On an adjusted basis, however, Anthropic posted operating income of $1.62 billion, compared with a loss of $1.85 billion a year earlier. The company also reports more than $131 billion in cash.

Trading could begin on November 16 on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. According to Yahoo Finance, investment banks are reportedly weighing a valuation of between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion (a figure not confirmed by the company).

Verma pointed to another detail: customers spending more than $10 million a year rank among the top 250 clients. He expected a higher threshold and reads it as a sign that the potential market, the TAM (*total addressable market*, the maximum demand a business can aim for), is even larger. Verma has a direct interest: he oversees Robinhood Ventures, a portfolio with stakes in OpenAI, Databricks, Mercor and Cognition, whose value depends on how the market receives Anthropic.

**Our take.** The headline and the net loss cannot simply be read side by side. The source does not specify how much of the $80.7 billion loss stems from items that are not operating cash, nor does it quantify committed compute. Anthropic should be assessed as a capital-intensive infrastructure business, not by its bottom line.

What has been demonstrated is demand: growth like this shows that companies are paying for agents and models that already handle real work for them. That has a harsh short-term side, because every point of enterprise adoption puts pressure on more administrative jobs. And it has a long-term side: the capacity being financed today with this level of spending is the same capacity that can accelerate biomedical research and make abundance cheaper.

There are two caveats. First, a $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion multiple assumes current growth will be sustained for years; triple-digit rates do not last. Second, retail interest in the debut, which Yahoo Finance highlights, raises the risk of volatility that does not reflect fundamentals. The IPO will be a barometer of how much capital the market is willing to put into frontier AI, and of whether solvency will be measured by revenue or by compute commitments.