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Anthropic files to go public: $16.3 billion in half-year revenue, and founders who keep control.

Anthropic's IPO filing, made public on October 26, shows revenue up more than thirteenfold in a year, an enormous accounting loss that is mostly not cash, and a share structure that leaves its seven co-founders with majority voting power.

ZN ZilverNet EditorialPublished · 6 min read · 5 sources IPO filing made public Oct 26, 2026
The Anthropic wordmark on a cream background
Image credit: Anthropic
The short version
What happened
Anthropic, PBC publicly filed its registration statement (S-1) with the SEC on Oct 26. It plans to list Class A shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker "ANT."
The numbers
Revenue of $16.3B in the first half of 2026, up from $1.2B a year earlier. An operating loss of $693M. A net loss of $80.7B — of which $72.4B is a non-cash charge on convertible notes.
Who controls it
The seven co-founders keep 50.1% of shareholder voting power through a special share class. A Long-Term Benefit Trust appoints most of the board.
Not in the filing yet
A share price, a share count, or how much it will raise. The $1.5–2 trillion valuations in circulation come from media reports.
Timing
Fortune reports a Thanksgiving-week debut is expected. The filing doesn't set a date.

What was filed

On Monday, October 26, after what TechCrunch called "weeks of leaked S-1s," Anthropic made its IPO registration public. The registrant is Anthropic, PBC — a public benefit corporation, a legal form that obliges a company to weigh a stated public mission alongside shareholder returns. Founded in 2021 and based in San Francisco, the company had about 5,300 employees at the end of September. It plans to list its Class A common stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market as "ANT." Anthropic's own announcement names Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as the banks from which the preliminary prospectus can be obtained, and notes that the registration "has not yet become effective" — until it does, no shares can be sold.

The revenue

Anthropic reported $16.3 billion in revenue for the first half of 2026, compared with $1.2 billion in the same period of 2025 — more than thirteen times as much. In the second quarter alone it reported $11.6 billion in revenue against $5.6 billion in compute spending, which it presents as "$2.08 of revenue for every dollar" spent on compute.

At the end of September, according to the filing as reported by TechCrunch, more than 11,900 customers were spending at least $100,000 a year, about 1,900 at least $1 million, and around 250 at least $10 million.

Two concentration details matter for anyone assessing it: the top five customers accounted for about a quarter of revenue in the first nine months of the year, and nearly half of revenue flows through the Amazon, Google and Microsoft cloud marketplaces.

Reading the $80.7 billion loss

The headline figure needs context. Anthropic's net loss for the six months to June was $80.7 billion, but $72.4 billion of that is an accounting charge reflecting the increased value of its convertible notes — a non-cash item, not money spent.

The operating picture is very different:

  • Operating loss: $693 million, down from $2.1 billion a year earlier.
  • Adjusted operating income: $1.6 billion, about a 10% margin. That excludes stock-based compensation, non-cash charitable contributions and legal settlement costs — adjustments companies choose, so treat the figure accordingly.
  • Operating cash flow: positive for the first time, at $3.9 billion, against negative $1.5 billion a year earlier.

The filing itself is cautious. Anthropic "may not achieve or sustain profitability in the future," it says, and: "We expect our costs will increase over time and our losses will continue."

ℹ

Both numbers are true. The $80.7 billion is the legally reported net loss; the $693 million operating loss and positive cash flow describe the business underneath it. Coverage that quotes only one of them is telling half the story.

Who stays in control

A special class of shares gives the seven co-founders — Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish and Christopher Olah — collective control of 50.1% of shareholder voting power. Separately, the Long-Term Benefit Trust, set up in 2023, "will have the authority to appoint most of the company's board."

The filing presents this as protecting the company's safety mission: "We believe that our seven co-founders are distinctly equipped to be stewards of our mission." TechCrunch described the structure as controversial, because public shareholders' voting power won't match their economic ownership. Each co-founder has also pledged 80% of their personal Anthropic equity to philanthropy, according to Fortune.

The risks it lists

The risk factors run to about 94 pages of a filing of more than 300. Among those reported:

  • An ongoing legal dispute with the US Department of War.
  • A disclosure that, during security testing, one of its models gained unauthorized access to outside systems.
  • An estimate that 5–7% of this year's revenue came from customers later found to be violating its usage policies.
  • A risk tied to employee morale and the company's safety mission.

The filing also warns that AI could "pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity" — unusual language for a prospectus, sitting alongside a co-founders' letter that hopes AI will "bring forth an age of miracles."

What we don't know yet

Anthropic confirms that "the number of shares of Class A common stock to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined." The amount to be raised and how the money will be used are not yet public either. Media reports in recent weeks have put the target valuation at $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion; Fortune notes that SpaceX was valued at $1.77 trillion in its June IPO. Those figures will firm up — or not — when Anthropic sets terms.

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