Today, October 26, 2026, Anthropic, the company behind the AI model Claude, made its S-1 filing public with the SEC, the US securities regulator. It’s the formal step before an initial public offering: the company will list on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. It had already submitted a confidential draft in June; now, for the first time, anyone can see what the books of one of the big AI labs actually look like.
The key numbers
- Revenue: $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, up from $1.16 billion in the same period a year earlier.
- First operating profit: $974 million in the second quarter. On an adjusted basis, operating income for the half was $1.6 billion (a 10% margin).
- A net loss of $80.7 billion for the half. It sounds outrageous, but about $72.4 billion of it is an accounting charge, not money spent: Anthropic has convertible notes that become more valuable as the company’s own valuation rises.
- Cash: it has raised $141.1 billion in total. As of June 30 it held $112.4 billion in cash and $19.3 billion in short-term investments.
- Large customers: more than 11,900 customers pay over $100,000 a year, up from about 950 a year earlier.
Who’s in charge: the founders keep control
Anthropic remains a public benefit corporation, a company that, besides making money, is legally required to pursue a public mission. Its governance structure is unusual:
- An entity owned by the seven co-founders holds a single Class F share with 50.1% of the votes on ordinary shareholder matters, and new share issues don’t dilute it.
- The Long-Term Benefit Trust, a trust designed to safeguard the company’s mission, elects a majority of the board.
- The filing itself admits that buyers of Class A shares, the ones that will trade, will in practice be unable to decide shareholder votes.
When, and at what price?
We don’t know yet. The filing leaves the number of shares and the price range blank. According to the Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources, the aim is to debut the week of November 16 and raise more than $100 billion at a valuation of $1.5 to $2 trillion. These figures are unconfirmed: we’ll have to wait for later versions of the filing.
Why it matters
- Transparency. Until now, everything we knew about AI labs’ finances came from leaks. An S-1 forces a company to publish its accounts and risks. Anthropic devotes nearly a hundred pages to risk factors, covering model misuse, loss of control, abuse by authoritarian regimes and economic disruption.
- The cost of compute. According to the filing, it has compute spending commitments of at least $114.5 billion with Google and $110 billion with Amazon. Growing in AI means, above all, paying for data centres.
- A barometer for the whole sector. It comes at a time of doubt: this weekend, Apollo’s chief economist, Torsten Slok, argued that AI has so far delivered no financial payoff to most companies outside the tech sector. The market’s response to this IPO will say a lot about how the AI business is valued.
Sources
- The Next Web: Anthropic files for Nasdaq IPO as half-year revenue hits $16.3bn
- Engadget: Anthropic files to go public
- Bloomberg: S-1 Filing Offers First Look at Claude Maker’s Finances
- CNBC: Anthropic IPO live updates
- TechCrunch: AI delivers ‘zero financial payoff’ to most companies, Apollo economist says
Note: this article was prepared with the help of Claude, the AI model made by Anthropic, the company it covers. All figures come from the linked sources.