Eagerly awaited: Anthropic has officially filed for an IPO. The Claude maker filed its S-1 with the SEC on Monday and plans to list it on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “ANT.” The number of shares and price range are still unknown, but previous reports put the target raise at up to $100 billion, and the listing is expected before Thanksgiving.
Anthropic’s filing begins with a letter in which the co-founders say they believe “AI is one of the most consequential technologies in human history.” The rest of the 300-plus page document attempts to back up this claim with numbers, while also providing unusually detailed explanations of how things could go wrong.
Anthropic generated revenue of $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, up from $1.2 billion a year earlier. The second quarter alone brought in $11.6 billion. From a technical perspective, the most telling number is: Q2 revenue increased 1,368% year-over-year, while computing and infrastructure costs increased 300%. In other words, Claude’s supply is becoming cheaper much faster than demand is increasing.
The company says Claude Opus 5.5 has reduced customer costs per task by about 40% compared to Opus 5, and according to one analyst’s calculations, Anthropic went from selling Inference at a loss in late 2025 to making a profit of about $2 for every dollar of computing power in the second quarter.
On paper, Anthropic also lost $80.7 billion in the first half of the year, but that number says more about its rising valuation than the company’s spending. About $72 billion of that comes from investor bonds held by lenders like Amazon and converted into shares when the company goes public.
As Anthropic’s valuation rose, those future shares became more valuable, and accounting rules require the company to record that increase as a loss, even if no money actually left the building. The cost of operating the company itself resulted in a much smaller loss of $693 million.
Largest IPOs in History, by Deal Size
| rank | Company (year) | Deal size |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Anthropocene (2026)* | ~$100.0 billion |
| 2 | SpaceX (2026) | $75.0 billion |
| 3 | SK Hynix (2026) | $26.5 billion |
| 4 | Saudi Aramco (2019) | $25.6 billion |
| 5 | Alibaba (2014) | $21.8 billion |
*Anthropic IPO estimate. Source: Renaissance Capital
Claude’s introduction has a strong entrepreneurial motivation. More than 11,900 customers pay Anthropic at least $100,000 a year, about 250 pay more than $10 million, and over half of the Fortune 500 are on its customer list.
Anthropic says it treats computing power as a single pool distributed across AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, Nvidia GPUs and AMD GPUs, shifting capacity to research, training, internal use and customers based on where it is most productive.
The financial commitments behind this computing pool are enormous, exceeding $600 billion for many partners and extending into the 2030s. Google is the largest, with at least $114.5 billion committed and up to another $150 billion in TPU purchases planned between 2028 and 2031. A lease deal with Broadcom is worth $161.2 billion, and the SpaceXAI deal for Nvidia GPU capacity is worth up to $120.5 billion.
An interesting claim in the S-1 is what Anthropic calls “coming full circle.” Claude now helps run experiments, generate training data, automate evaluations and security audits, and write code for his own successors. The company describes this as one of its biggest structural advantages, but also a risk. About 94 pages of the filing are devoted to risk factors, including the possibility that the models could exhibit “self-perpetuating” behavior.
On the product page, the Claude Code filing cites the clearest example of autonomous AI work to date and notes that NASA engineers have planned it to be the first AI-powered drive for the Perseverance rover on Mars. Claude Cowork, which launched in preview in January, is now being integrated into the main Claude app and adopted more quickly than Claude Code at the same stage.
The question of who will run Anthropic after the IPO is largely the same people. A single share held by the seven co-founders carries 50.1% of the shareholder votes. Each co-founder holds about 240 million shares, valued at about $14 billion in the most recent private round, and all seven have committed to giving away 80% of their equity, although those commitments are not legally binding, according to the filing.
