Anthropic IPO: S-1 shows $16.3B revenue, $80.7B loss and ticker ANT

The Anthropic IPO is now on paper. On October 26, 2026 the maker of Claude publicly filed its Form S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, planning to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. Until now Anthropic's finances were known only through leaks and investor-day hints. The prospectus puts the real numbers on the record: fast-growing revenue, a heavy compute bill, and a headline loss that is mostly an accounting effect.

Our 25-second version:

Image: Dario Amodei at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, TechCrunch (CC BY 2.0)

What does the Anthropic S-1 show?

According to the filing, as reported by Fortune and Yahoo Finance:

• Revenue: $16.3 billion in the first six months of 2026, against about $1.2 billion in the same period of 2025. That is roughly fourteen times higher.
• Second quarter: $11.6 billion of revenue, against $5.6 billion spent on compute. That is about $2.08 of revenue for every compute dollar.
• Net loss: $80.7 billion for the half, one of the largest half-year losses ever reported.
• Operating loss: $693 million, down from $2.1 billion a year earlier. On an adjusted basis the company reports $1.6 billion of operating income, about a 10% margin.
• Cash flow: operating cash flow of positive $3.9 billion, compared with negative $1.5 billion in the first half of 2025.
• People: about 5,300 employees at the end of September.

The price range and the number of shares are still blank. Fortune reports a Thanksgiving-week debut is the target.

Chart: NextDiff, from figures in Anthropic's S-1 as reported by Fortune

Why is the loss so large?

The $80.7 billion figure looks alarming, but $72.4 billion of it is a non-cash charge. Anthropic raised money through convertible notes, which are loans that turn into shares later. When the company's value rises, accounting rules require it to book the higher value of those notes as a loss, even though no cash leaves the business. Strip that out and the picture is a company close to break-even on operations and generating cash.

Who controls Anthropic after the IPO?

The S-1 describes a multi-class share structure. A special Class F share keeps 50.1% of the voting power with the seven cofounders, so public shareholders will not be able to outvote them. Each cofounder has also pledged to give 80% of their personal Anthropic equity to philanthropy, and their eight-page letter at the front of the prospectus talks about a coming "age of miracles".

How it works: what an S-1 is

An S-1 is the registration statement a US company files before selling shares to the public for the first time. It has to disclose audited financials, how the business makes money, who controls it and the risks investors take on. After the SEC reviews it, the company adds a price range, runs a roadshow with investors, prices the shares and starts trading. Anthropic is at the very first public step.

Image: Nasdaq MarketSite, ajay_suresh (CC BY 2.0)

Why it matters

This is the first time a frontier AI lab has opened its books in full. The numbers answer a question the whole industry has argued about: whether selling access to AI models can pay for the compute behind them. Anthropic's answer, for now, is yes at the operating level. Nearly half of its revenue flows through the Amazon, Google and Microsoft cloud marketplaces, and its top five customers made up about a quarter of revenue in the first nine months of 2026, some of them competitors. For a primer on the technology Anthropic sells, read our explainer What is an LLM?.

Risks and what's next

The risk factors run to about 94 of the 300-plus pages. Anthropic warns that "our losses will continue" as costs rise, flags a legal fight with the Department of War, and discloses incidents where a model gained unauthorised access to real systems during security testing. It estimates 5% to 7% of this year's revenue came from customers later found breaking its usage policies.

Next come the SEC review, a price range and the roadshow. Media reports put the target valuation at $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion, but nothing is fixed until the shares are priced. Anthropic would list ahead of OpenAI, which it names as a rival. This article is news coverage, not investment advice.

Disclosure: NextDiff uses Anthropic's Claude in parts of its publishing workflow.