Claude maker Anthropic has claimed artificial intelligence could help cure diseases such as cancer and grow economies around the world as it launches its plan to list its shares on the US stock market.
The company has unveiled never-seen-before details of its business as it gears up for a blockbuster market debut.
On Monday, the firm disclosed steep losses and red-hot revenue growth in its US IPO filing, laying out its ambition to build AI systems capable of reshaping the global economy – despite the high costs of developing such technology.
The IPO is expected to establish Anthropic, which was founded in 2021, as a benchmark for how Wall Street values leading AI companies. It comes amid growing concern about the “existential risks to humanity” that advanced AI poses.
Anthropic said it will list on the Nasdaq under the symbol “ANT”. The number of shares to be released and their price range have yet to be determined, the company said.
The IPO could become the biggest listing in history, with expectations that it could exceed Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which gained an initial valuation of around $1.8 trillion. Some current and prospective investors are valuing Anthropic at about $1.5 trillion, down from roughly $2 trillion a week ago.
Can AI cure cancer?
Anthropic has kicked off plans to launch its shares on the stock market with some bold claims, such as AI’s ability to help cure diseases such as cancer and grow economies around the world.
The company said it believes AI is “one of the most consequential technologies in human history” with the potential to “improve the quality of human life” in a number of ways.
This includes accelerating scientific innovation and “potentially curing diseases that have plagued humanity for millennia, including cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, rare genetic diseases and the major infectious diseases”, the document read.
However, the prospectus also highlights risks associated with its AI models, which it said could exhibit "self-preserving behaviors", including attempts to "resist shutdown", to "conceal or manipulate information" and behaviour "resembling blackmail".
Who is Anthropic – and how much money does it have?
Founded by former OpenAI researchers including siblings Dario and Daniela Amoedia, Anthropic is the brains behind the Claude family of AI models.
Across four tiers - Fable, Opus, Sonnet and Haiku - Claude powers products such as Anthropic's chatbot, coding agent and the enterprise-focused Claude Cowork AI agent.
Anthropic’s early focus on training its models for coding tasks helped the company get ahead in the AI race, attracting a steady stream of enterprise customers.
A large part of its revenue comes from businesses paying for its models per use, measured in “tokens” of information processed. It also generates money from paid customer subscription tiers.
Anthropic has grown its revenue to $4.59 billion in 2025 from $386 million a year ago and $41 million in 2023. For the six months ended June 2026, Anthropic’s revenue had reached a staggering $16.29 billion.
But Anthropic’s rapid growth has been met with substantial losses. Its operating loss for the first half of 2026 was $693 million. In 2025, it was $8.06 billion, up from $2.98 billion a year ago.
Why is Anthropic losing money?
The company's costs include computing fees paid to cloud services providers such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, costs tied to data center facilities and renting data center capacity, equipment leases and energy bills.
Over the past three years, Anthropic's compute and infrastructure expenses have dwarfed its revenue.
The company has committed more than $500 billion in spending with six partners over a decade - one of the largest AI buildout commitments on record.
Anthropic said many portions of its agreements are non-cancelable or require payments regardless of usage. It has committed to spend at least $110 billion with Amazon , about $114.5 billion with Google and $44.9 billion with Microsoft for cloud computing over the next seven to 10 years.
Who is backing Anthropic?
Some of the companies sinking Anthropic’s revenue are also its largest backers.
Amazon and Google are among Anthropic's top shareholders, marking yet another example of the circular financing structures that have dominated capital flows in the AI industry. Amazon has invested at least $13 billion in Anthropic and has agreed to invest up to $20 billion more.
Google has committed up to $40 billion to Anthropic.
Read MoreAI can help cure cancer, Anthropic suggests in filing for US stock market float
