Okay, this one’s hard to ignore. Anthropic filed its S-1 yesterday, so the company behind Claude is officially on the road to going public under the ticker ANT. Reports are floating a valuation somewhere around $1.5 to $2 trillion, which would make it one of the biggest IPOs ever — though the filing itself doesn’t actually set a price yet, so take that number as reported, not confirmed.
The part that stopped me scrolling: $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of this year, up from $1.2 billion a year earlier. The headline loss looks absurd — $80.7 billion — but most of that is paper accounting on convertible notes, not cash walking out the door. The operating loss was way smaller, under $700 million, and it actually turned an operating profit in Q2.
What I’m curious about is the other half of the argument. You’ve got people reading this as proof the AI boom isn’t a bubble, and others doing the math on the compute commitments — hundreds of billions — and asking how that ever pays for itself. And then there’s the governance stuff: the founders keep control through a special share, so public investors don’t really get to steer the ship.
Source: Anthropic's IPO gives investors new insight into the company
So where do you land? Is this the moment AI companies prove they can be real, durable businesses, or is it the top of the cycle dressed up in a prospectus?
