Anthropic Files for Nasdaq IPO, $16.3bn H1 Revenue

Anthropic has filed publicly to list its shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker “ANT”. Its Form S-1, posted by the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday 26 October, shows the maker of Claude took $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026, up 1,300% on a year earlier. It also shows a net loss of $80.7 billion for those six months.

The filing puts the company’s own accounts, audited for full years and unaudited for the half-years, behind numbers that until now came from leaks. Last week the Wall Street Journal and Reuters described a confidential draft with the same headline revenue and loss. What the public version does not yet contain is a price. The price range is printed as “between $ and $”, and the number of shares on offer is blank. Anthropic’s own announcement says both “have not yet been determined”.

In brief

Anthropic has publicly filed an S-1 to list on Nasdaq as ANT. The price range and share count are still blank.
Revenue was $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026. Most of the $80.7 billion net loss was a $72.4 billion fair-value charge, not cash spent.
A trust that elects most of the board and a founders’ share with 50.1% of votes will keep control after listing.

Revenue has grown more than tenfold, and Anthropic says that won’t last

Anthropic’s revenue went from $41 million in 2023 to $386 million in 2024 and $4.6 billion in 2025, according to the filing. The first half of 2026 alone brought $16.3 billion, against $1.16 billion a year earlier. The number of customers paying $100,000 or more a year rose from over 600 to over 6,000 in the same period. The figure for the three months to 30 September is left blank in this version, so the $16.8 billion third-quarter number reported earlier this month is still unconfirmed.

The company warns against reading those rates forward. “We do not expect our revenue will continue to grow at comparable rates, and we cannot assure you that it will continue to grow at all,” the risk factors say, adding that Anthropic has “struggled to accurately forecast our revenue in the past”.

Much of the money comes through someone else’s storefront. About 48% of first-half revenue came from customers buying Claude through cloud marketplaces, up from 11% in 2023, the filing says. Those platforms belong to Amazon, Google and Microsoft, which act as billing channels and are paid fees, and which also sell AI models that compete with Claude. Sales through them made up 58% of Anthropic’s net receivables at the end of June. No single customer accounted for more than 10% of revenue in the first nine months of 2026, but the top five made up about 25%.

Most of the $80.7bn loss was an accounting charge, not cash spent

The headline loss is mostly a paper figure. Of the $80.7 billion, $72.4 billion is a change in the fair value of convertible notes, derivative liabilities and SAFEs, which are agreements to hand investors shares later. Anthropic says the charge was “primarily driven by an increase in the fair value of our outstanding convertible promissory notes resulting from an increase in our enterprise valuation”.

In plain terms, investors lent Anthropic money on terms that let them turn the debt into shares. As the company’s value rose, those notes became more valuable, and accounting rules require Anthropic to book that increase as a cost. No cash changed hands, and the cash flow statement adds the full $72.4 billion back. A further $8.8 billion of other expense comes mainly from valuing assets and liabilities under its note purchase agreements, and $8.7 billion of that is also added back.

Strip those items out and the picture is different. Anthropic’s operating loss for the half was $693 million, down from $2.1 billion a year earlier, and its operations brought in $3.9 billion of cash rather than using it. It spent $8.9 billion on compute and infrastructure in six months, more than its $7.3 billion for all of 2025. At the end of June it held $112.4 billion in cash and $19.3 billion in short-term investments.

A trust and seven founders keep control after listing

Public shareholders will buy into a company they cannot steer. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation under Delaware law, so its board must balance shareholders’ financial interests against those affected by its conduct and its stated purpose: “the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity”.

Its Long-Term Benefit Trust, five trustees the filing calls “financially disinterested”, holds a single class of stock that lets it elect and remove directors who will make up a majority of the board. Separately, one Class F share held by a company owned by the seven co-founders, including chief executive Dario Amodei and president Daniela Amodei, will carry 50.1% of the votes on ordinary shareholder matters. Employees get Class E stock with limited votes and no economic rights. Class N shares, with no votes, go “primarily” to strategic business partners. Amazon and Google will each hold more than 5% of the stock once their preferred shares and notes convert. Because the trust elects most of the board, Anthropic qualifies as a “controlled company” under Nasdaq rules; it says it will use that status only to keep its nominating and governance committee from being fully independent.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley lead the deal, followed on the cover by J.P. Morgan and Citigroup and 18 other banks. CNBC reported that Anthropic filed confidentially in June, which gave the SEC time to review the numbers.

Investors are being asked to price growth they cannot vote on

The structure means ANT holders will own the company’s economics without steering it. Votes on directors outside the trust’s majority sit with the founders’ share, and the trust’s directors are chosen by people with no financial stake. That is a deliberate trade: the filing says the design will make takeovers and proxy fights harder. It is also a test of whether public markets will fund a safety-first governance model at this size. Early backers such as Eric Schmidt bought in on those terms, and the S-1 now asks the wider market to do the same.

The accounts make the trade easier to judge than the leaks did. A loss of $80.7 billion would look like collapse. A $693 million operating loss alongside positive operating cash reads like a business close to paying for itself before the cost of the next generation of compute. The filing says Amazon’s notes convert into shares just before the listing only up to an ownership cap, with any balance converting quarterly afterwards, so the charge may not disappear entirely from future accounts.

The pressure is on rivals too. OpenAI has reportedly been racing to raise money before Anthropic lists, and big tech is tapping public markets on its own account, with Meta launching $35bn of share offerings on Monday. The number to watch now is the one still missing from page one: the price range, which an amended S-1 will have to fill in before any roadshow begins.