Citigroup Joins Anthropic's IPO Bank Lineup as Credit Line Set to Top $10 Billion

Since Anthropic filed confidential IPO paperwork with the SEC on June 1, the company has been quietly stacking its bank lineup and expanding its balance sheet ahead of what could be the largest tech listing in history.

The newest development: Citigroup Inc. is set to join Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. as a top-tier bank on the IPO, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg News. Citigroup already sits atop Bloomberg's 2026 US IPO league table, largely on the strength of its role in SpaceX's record-setting $86.2 billion offering. Landing a top spot on Anthropic's deal would extend that streak and hand Citigroup a bigger cut of the fees.

Representatives for Anthropic and Citigroup declined to comment, according to Bloomberg. Deliberations are ongoing and more banks could still be added, the people said.

The credit line is getting bigger too

Anthropic's revolving credit facility, first set up last year at $2.5 billion with Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Royal Bank of Canada and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, is now set to climb past a roughly $10 billion target, according to Bloomberg reporting picked up by NDTV Profit, LiveMint and Outlook Business.

The pecking order among lenders is specific. Anthropic has asked its most active banks to commit around $1.25 billion each, the next tier around $1 billion, and less active participants roughly $750 million or lower, according to people familiar with the matter. In syndicated lending, bigger commitments generally mean bigger fees, and banks angling for a prominent IPO role are lining up to write bigger checks now.

Weeks earlier, banks led by Morgan Stanley were in talks to arrange $15 billion in debt for an Anthropic data-center project in Texas, backed by Alphabet Inc.'s Google, according to Bloomberg. That financing, for a developer called Nexus Data Centers, would include a $14 billion bridge loan plus a revolving credit facility.

Following the SpaceX playbook

The strategy mirrors what SpaceX did before its own record IPO. SpaceX expanded its revolver to $5 billion in May, up from $1.5 billion, just a month before it went public, according to its prospectus. The bank group on that credit line was largely the same group that worked the IPO. Anthropic appears to be running the identical play: reward the banks financing your balance sheet with lead roles on the listing.

How big could this thing be

Anthropic is reportedly running the numbers on an IPO that could match or exceed SpaceX's $86.2 billion raise, according to people familiar with the matter cited by the Business Times. Investor briefings led by chief financial officer Krishna Rao have reportedly sidestepped direct valuation questions. One outlet, KuCoin, pegged Anthropic's post-money valuation at $965 billion following its Series H round; that figure is consistent with Bloomberg's reporting that Anthropic raised $65 billion in May at that valuation, topping OpenAI's $852 billion mark from March.

The numbers behind the hype are real, and so are the losses. Anthropic posted a net loss of nearly $42 billion in 2025, roughly five times the $8.3 billion loss from the year before, according to documents seen by Bloomberg News. At the same time, preliminary second-quarter revenue hit more than $11.5 billion, compared with $787 million in the same period a year earlier, and the company's revenue run rate reached $65 billion by the end of July, Bloomberg reported. Anthropic did post positive adjusted operating income in the second quarter, which the company and its bankers are likely to lean on heavily as they pitch investors on a growth story that still bleeds enormous cash.

A company burning tens of billions a year is being valued in the same neighborhood as Saudi Aramco and Apple. Investors betting on Anthropic are betting the AI boom keeps compounding revenue fast enough to outrun the burn rate, particularly given deals like the multi-year computing agreement with SpaceX that Bloomberg says could be worth tens of billions of dollars.

Anthropic could file publicly as soon as the end of August, with a Wall Street debut expected this fall, ahead of rival OpenAI, which is reportedly eyeing a 2027 listing instead, according to Bloomberg. Nothing here is locked. The credit facility could land at $10 billion or below depending on how talks go, the people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg, and the eventual IPO valuation and share count remain undecided pending the public filing. Whether a $965 billion-plus valuation on a company still losing tens of billions a year gets a reality check once the actual S-1 numbers are public remains to be seen.