Anthropic's prospectus shows a $42 billion loss, but $34 billion of it is an accounting charge

Anthropic lost nearly $42 billion in 2025, according to its IPO prospectus, Reuters reported on Monday. The headline number overstates how much money the company spent. Reuters said about $34 billion of the loss was an accounting charge: an increase in the estimated value of financing that could eventually turn into Anthropic shares. It was not cash spent running the business.

The loss that matters is about $8 billion

Take that charge out and the figure that describes the business is the operating loss, which Reuters put at more than $8 billion. That excludes writedowns of liabilities that Reuters said were mostly tied to earlier fundraising. The $42 billion figure will be quoted widely. For anyone judging whether the business model works, $8 billion is the one to use.

Against that, revenue rose 12-fold in 2025 to nearly $4.6 billion. That implies roughly $380 million in 2024.

What the costs look like next to revenue

Reuters reported total operating expenses of $12.65 billion, of which $7.33 billion went to compute and infrastructure. Compute spending tripled from 2024. Working from those figures:

• Operating expenses were about 2.75 times revenue.
• Compute alone was about 58% of expenses and about 1.6 times revenue. Anthropic spent more on compute and infrastructure than it took in.
• Cash, equivalents and short-term investments were $20.28 billion at Dec. 31. Reuters also reported $518 billion of planned spending on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations, about 25 times that cash balance. Those commitments are dozens of times larger than last year's operating loss.

These are calendar 2025 figures. Reuters did not report results for 2026 to date.

Customer concentration

The risk factors may matter more to buyers of the shares than the loss. Anthropic said nearly a quarter of its revenue came from two customers last year, which would be more than $1 billion on $4.6 billion of revenue. It also warned that many of its largest clients are not locked into long-term contracts and could cut or stop spending. Reuters noted that Amazon and Google have invested billions in Anthropic and also supply the cloud capacity it runs on. Reuters did not name the two customers.

The valuation math

Reuters said the listing could value Anthropic at more than $2 trillion, more than double its estimated $965 billion value in May. That is about 435 times 2025 revenue. The multiple on current revenue would be lower if revenue has kept growing this year, and the filing's 2026 numbers will settle that. Reuters previously reported that the debut is likely to come after the November midterm elections.

The comparison investors will reach for is SpaceX. Reuters said it priced its June IPO at $135, surged 19% to $160 on its first day and now trades around $147. OpenAI filed confidentially in June and is expected to list by early 2027, according to media reports.

What we're watching

When the public filing lands, three lines matter: 2026 revenue to date, which shows whether the 12-fold pace is holding; the schedule of the $518 billion in obligations by year; and whether the two large customers are named. Related: Anthropic's Opus 5.5 price cut, the Akamai compute deal, stocks.

Disclosure: The Company Chronicle uses AI tools, including Anthropic's Claude, in producing its coverage. Sources: Reuters, "Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows sweeping AI vision, surging costs," via Devdiscourse. Ratios and the implied 2024 revenue are our calculations from Reuters' figures. Anthropic declined to comment to Reuters. This is market information, not investment advice.