Anthropic's IPO Numbers Are Out. Crypto Traders Already Bet $2 Trillion
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| By Dawn Pennington |
Late Sunday night, President Trump hosted Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei for a private, one-on-one dinner at the White House — their first such meeting.
The timing was pointed.
Two days earlier, a D.C. Circuit court reinstated a Pentagon "supply chain risk" designation against Anthropic, a label the company is still fighting in court.
The White House had also circulated a memo criticizing Amodei and the effective altruism networks tied to him.
Then came the invitation.
Trump's public position on artificial intelligence hasn't softened.
Before the dinner, he said he wanted to "talk about" regulation, but framed it in competitive terms:
"I'm for let's go and let's win ... we're about a year, maybe a year and a half up on China."
That fits his broader stance this month.
He's called AI safety warnings a "hoax." He's pushed to rebrand AI as "super intelligence." And he's dismissed the kind of slowdown Amodei has publicly called for.
But here's where this starts to get interesting for investors.
Nothing about the dinner changed policy.
The Pentagon designation on Anthropic still stands. Neither side has released a quote or readout from the meeting.
What it shows instead is that public criticism and private access can run on separate tracks.
Washington Is Still Saying “Go”
And that's important because Anthropic is preparing to ask public-market investors to put a very large price on its future.
Today, Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson and other tech CEOs are gathering in Washington for a White House AI summit expected to focus on acceleration and the race with China rather than new restrictions.
For investors, that means the broader operating environment hasn't changed much:
No federal pause. No federal brakes. And continued political support for the enormous AI infrastructure buildout already underway.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon put a number on just how enormous that buildout could become this week.
He said hyperscaler AI spending could hit $1 trillion next year, up from about $700 billion this year and $300 billion the year before.
But Dimon isn't calling it free money.
He's also warned that the buildout "may add a little bit to inflation" as companies compete for labor, power and materials.
And Anthropic offers a particularly interesting example of the tension surrounding the AI boom.
On one side, you have an administration pushing to move faster.
On the other, Anthropic has been one of the industry's louder voices warning about the potential risks of frontier AI.
And now we finally know what building that technology actually costs.
Now We Know What “Superintelligence” Costs
Anthropic's IPO prospectus became public today.
And the numbers are staggering.
The company reported $4.59 billion in 2025 revenue, up 12-fold from the year before.
It also reported a $42 billion net loss.
There's an important distinction here, though.
Anthropic's operating loss was about $8.06 billion. Roughly $34 billion of the larger net loss came from accounting charges tied to financial instruments.
That's still an enormous amount of money.
And it gets bigger.
Anthropic disclosed roughly $518 billion in future cloud and infrastructure commitments, on top of $7.33 billion already spent on computing last year.
Whatever you want to call it, "superintelligence" is turning out to be spectacularly expensive to build.
And Anthropic's own paperwork gives investors one of the clearest looks yet at the price tag.
The company is still targeting a valuation above $2 trillion, although Reuters reports the actual offering may not happen until after November's midterm elections — later than the October timeline investors had been discussing.
Crypto Traders Didn't Wait for Wall Street
Normally, this is where Wall Street would start debating what Anthropic is worth.
That's the part of this story I find most interesting.
Binance has been running ANTHROPICUSDT perpetual futures since June, built around an estimated 1 billion shares.
That gives crypto traders a way to make leveraged bets on Anthropic's eventual public valuation — months before investors ever had an IPO prospectus to analyze.
And those contracts have traded near levels implying a valuation of roughly $2 trillion.
Think about that for a moment.
Before Anthropic gave public investors its revenue ...
Before it disclosed its losses ...
Before we knew about hundreds of billions of dollars in future infrastructure commitments ...
Crypto traders were already trying to put a price on the company.
Now the Bet Meets Reality
Now we have some actual numbers to compare those bets against.
And they paint a fascinating picture.
Anthropic's revenue is growing extraordinarily quickly. The AI infrastructure boom still has political support in Washington. And investors clearly believe frontier AI could become one of the defining technologies of the next decade.
But building it requires staggering amounts of capital.
Anthropic also carries an unusual amount of political uncertainty, from its Pentagon designation to its disagreements with the administration over AI safety.
None of that tells us what Anthropic will ultimately be worth when — or if — it begins trading publicly.
But the ANTHROPICUSDT market gives us something we haven't traditionally had:
A real-time speculative market trying to price a major private company before Wall Street gets its turn.
That's worth watching even if you never trade the contract yourself.
Because crypto markets aren't just creating new assets anymore.
Increasingly, they're becoming testing grounds for price discovery in assets that haven't even reached traditional public markets yet.
And Anthropic may be one of the clearest examples we've seen so far.
To your health and wealth,
Dawn
P.S. Anthropic is a perfect example of why some of the biggest opportunities can start forming well before a stock's first day of trading.
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