Anthropic files to go public: $16.3B revenue, an $80.7B net loss, one share keeps 50.1% of the vote

Anthropic's revenue reached $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, about 13.5 times the year before.

The company filed those numbers on Monday, in the form a company uses to sell shares to the public.

That form is a Form S-1. Every company files it with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) before an initial public offering (IPO).

Class A shares will list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market as ANT (the letters for this listing).

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley will lead the sale, with 22 banks in total.

Nothing is priced yet.

The cover page leaves the share count and the price range blank. The company says shares will be sold "as soon as practicable" after the SEC approves the filing.

Reports from Fox Business and the Wall Street Journal put the roadshow in about two weeks. Pricing could land on November 19 or 20.

The second quarter is the story

Revenue gets the headlines. The filing buries the operating loss deeper in the document.

Anthropic's operating loss for the half was $693 million, down from $2.1 billion in the same period last year.

The second quarter alone brought in $11.6 billion of revenue and $974 million of operating income, the first operating profit the company has ever recorded.

Growth ran far ahead of cost.

Revenue climbed 1,368 percent year over year in the second quarter while compute costs grew 300 percent, the filing said. When I read that pairing, the gap between those rates seemed like the most important slide in the prospectus.

The $80.7 billion net loss still dominates the coverage. Most of that figure never touched the business. A $72.4 billion non-cash charge on convertible notes drove the total.

Non-cash means an accounting entry with no money moving, and this one grows when the company's valuation grows.

The filing also said Anthropic "may not achieve or sustain profitability in the future."

I get the sense the operating line is what the bankers will put on the first slide.

Who is writing the checks

Behind the revenue sit a small number of very large contracts, by the company's own account.

Anthropic reported more than 11,900 customers spending $100,000 or more a year as of the end of September. Another 1,900 spend over $1 million, and about 250 spend over $10 million.

Net revenue retention sits near 900 percent. The metric counts what the same customers spend now against a year ago. Existing accounts, for the most part, pay roughly nine times what they paid in 2025.

Concentration cuts the other way. The top five customers produced about a quarter of revenue over the nine months to September. Head count stays thin too, with roughly 5,300 employees, and compute contracts probably carry most of the cost.

Seven founders keep the vote

Public shareholders buy Class A stock with one vote per share. Seven company insiders hold the majority of the votes.

A Founder LLC holding a single Class F share carries 50.1 percent of the voting power on ordinary matters. The structure is a Founder LLC (a business set up to hold shares for a group).

Dario Amodei, the chief executive officer, works with six co-founders inside it. The Long-Term Benefit Trust, created in 2023, appoints most of the board.

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation, a status that obliges directors to weigh the public benefit against shareholder value.

Investors will probably debate that structure for the next month. I think the detail deserves the attention: on questions the seven insiders care about, the economic owners lose the vote.

The risk section runs more than 90 pages. It says that sufficiently advanced AI could "pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity," the filing said. The filing also said models "including our own" have shown behavior like resisting shutdown.

Amazon and Google each emerge above 5 percent once their convertible notes convert.

Meanwhile, OpenAI raises at $1.25 trillion

Anthropic's filing lands while its closest rival raises private money instead. OpenAI is close to finishing a round of up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion pre-money valuation.

CNBC (Consumer News and Business Channel) reported the round last week.

Reuters and the Guardian had already covered a roughly $20 billion shortfall against OpenAI's own revenue projections in October.

The two labs now carry public price tags on opposite sides of the market. Anthropic offers audited numbers with an operating profit in the quarter. OpenAI offers a term sheet that its revenue growth has to justify.

For anyone selling to both companies, negotiating power just moved toward the one that can open its books.

What SpaceX buyers learned

Precedent matters here. SpaceX listed in June 2026 at $135 a share, trading as SPCX (its own stock code). Day-one buyers were still down when we covered Anthropic's listing plans in August.

The New York Times reported that Monday's filing could set up the largest public listing ever.

The unresolved pieces are obvious. The price range is blank. Third-quarter revenue is blank too, left for an amendment.

The November dates are reports rather than filed commitments. The Department of War dispute still sits in the risk factors even after Anthropic's court win in August.

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