Anthropic IPO: Inside the S-1, $16.3B of Revenue in Six Months and the 50.1% Founder Vote
Anthropic IPO: Inside the S-1, $16.3B of Revenue in Six Months and the 50.1% Founder Vote
Anthropic filed to list on Nasdaq as ANT. We read the prospectus line by line so you can see what the growth, the $80.7B loss and the compute bill mean for founders and VCs.
The Anthropic IPO is officially on the calendar. Anthropic, PBC filed its Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on October 26, 2026 to list its Class A shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker ANT, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading a 22-bank syndicate. According to the S-1, revenue reached $16.29 billion in the first half of 2026, up from $1.16 billion a year earlier, and the company booked an $80.7 billion net loss over the same six months.
The filing leaves the price range, share count, raise size and valuation blank. The Run-Rate Revenue figure on page 195 is blank too. Everything you read about a valuation today comes from press reports, and we label it that way below.
Here is the full S-1 on SEC EDGAR.
Revenue in the second quarter of 2026 alone was $11.56 billion, according to the S-1 (p. 158). Anthropic brought in more revenue in those 91 days than in its entire history up to the end of 2025 ($5.0 billion across 2023, 2024 and 2025, our sum from p. 23).
That is the headline. The real story sits in four places: the quarterly revenue curve, the loss bridge, the compute contracts and the control structure.
Key takeaways
Anthropic reported $16,286 million of revenue in the six months ended June 30, 2026, against $1,163 million a year earlier, according to the S-1 (p. 23).
Second-quarter 2026 revenue grew 1,368% year over year while compute and infrastructure expenses grew 300%, according to the S-1 (p. 11). For the full first half, the S-1 puts revenue growth at 1,300% (p. 149), slightly below the 1,304% CNBC reported.
Anthropic’s $80,748 million first-half net loss includes $72,388 million of non-cash fair-value changes on convertible notes, derivative liabilities and SAFEs, according to the S-1 (p. 23).
Anthropic earned $974 million of operating income in the second quarter of 2026, its first profitable operating quarter in the six quarters shown, according to the S-1 (p. 158).
Customers paying $100,000 or more on a trailing twelve-month basis grew from more than 950 to more than 11,900 between September 30, 2025 and September 30, 2026, according to the S-1 (p. 195).
Net Revenue Retention was approximately 900% as of September 30, 2026, according to the S-1 (p. 11).
Anthropic disclosed named compute contracts with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, SpaceXAI, Broadcom, Nscale and Lambda that add up to roughly $637 billion, our sum of the figures on pages 171 and 172 of the S-1.
Seven co-founders will hold 50.1% of the vote through a single Class F share held by a Founder LLC, and the Long-Term Benefit Trust elects a majority of the board, according to the S-1 (cover page, p. 245).
Anthropic raised its last private round at a $965 billion valuation in May 2026, according to CNBC, and NBC News reports the IPO could value the company at more than $2 trillion.
Table of Contents
Anthropic Revenue: The Fastest Curve Ever Filed With the SEC
Is Anthropic Profitable? The $80.7B Loss Is Mostly a Valuation Charge
How Much Does Anthropic Spend on Compute? The Real Balance Sheet
How Many Customers Does Anthropic Have? The Engine Behind 900% Net Revenue Retention
Who Controls Anthropic? Two Holders Steer the Company
Anthropic IPO Valuation: How It Stacks Up Against Google, Facebook and SpaceX
Anthropic IPO Date: When Will ANT Start Trading?
What This Means for Founders, VCs and the AI Market
FAQs
1. Anthropic Revenue: The Fastest Curve Ever Filed With the SEC
The annual numbers already look unreal. Revenue went from $41 million in 2023 to $386 million in 2024 and then $4,585 million in 2025, a 1,088% jump in the last year, according to the S-1 (p. 23, p. 151).
The quarterly table is where it gets wild.
Q1 2025: $376 million
Q2 2025: $787 million
Q3 2025: $1,382 million
Q4 2025: $2,040 million
Q1 2026: $4,731 million
Q2 2026: $11,555 million
Source: S-1, quarterly results of operations (p. 158).
Revenue grew 144% from the first quarter of 2026 to the second. Add up the last four quarters and you get $19.7 billion of trailing revenue as of June 30, 2026. Multiply the June quarter by four and you get a $46.2 billion annualized pace. Both are our calculations from the S-1 table.
Two numbers explain where the money comes from.
Consumption beats subscriptions. Consumption-based revenue was $13.1 billion, or 80% of revenue, in the first half of 2026. Subscriptions brought in $3.2 billion, or 20% (S-1, p. 139).
The clouds are a giant sales force. Sales through cloud marketplaces made up 48% of revenue in the first half of 2026, up from 11% in 2023 (S-1, p. 57). Anthropic sells through AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, and pays each a fee.
Read the fine print and you also find two details most coverage skipped.
Anthropic estimates that 5% to 7% of its revenue in the nine months to September 30, 2026 came from customers it later found breaking its usage policy or commercial terms (S-1, p. 146). The company says enforcement tightened in August and September 2026, so expect some of that revenue to fade.
Seasonality is real too. Total customer spend fell about 20% in the two weeks ended January 2, 2026, against the prior two weeks, as companies froze code over the holidays (S-1, p. 144). Pay-per-token businesses feel every vacation.
2. Is Anthropic Profitable? The $80.7B Loss Is Mostly a Valuation Charge
The scary number is the net loss: $80,748 million in the first half of 2026, according to the S-1 (p. 23).
Here is the bridge from operations to that figure.
Operating loss: $(693) million
Interest income: $1,111 million
Change in fair value of convertible notes, derivative liabilities and SAFEs: $(72,388) million
Other expense, mostly fair-value moves on note purchase agreements: $(8,757) million
Income taxes: $(21) million
Net loss: $(80,748) million
Source: S-1, summary financial data (p. 23) and results of operations (p. 151).
Why does a rising valuation create a loss? Anthropic owes convertible notes and SAFEs that turn into shares. Every time the company’s valuation jumps, those instruments become more valuable to the holder, and accounting rules book that increase as an expense. The S-1 says the charges were “primarily driven by an increase in the fair value of our outstanding convertible promissory notes resulting from an increase in our enterprise valuation” (p. 23). The biggest hit landed in the June quarter, tied to the Series H round (p. 160).
So the more investors pay for Anthropic, the bigger its paper loss looks.
The operating picture tells the opposite story.
Operating margin moved from (249)% in Q1 2025 to +8% in Q2 2026 (S-1, p. 161).
Adjusted Operating Margin reached +19% in Q2 2026 (S-1, p. 161).
Adjusted Net Income was $2,671 million in the first half of 2026 (S-1, p. 25).
Operating cash flow was a positive $3,929 million in the first half of 2026, against $(1,513) million a year earlier (S-1, p. 169).
Anthropic also warns that margins will swing. Compute arrives in big blocks 12 to 18 months after it is contracted, so expenses hit before the revenue that capacity supports, and the company expects short-term compute purchases to compress margins in the near term (S-1, p. 134 to 135).
3. How Much Does Anthropic Spend on Compute? The Real Balance Sheet
Compute and infrastructure fell from 251% of revenue in Q1 2025 to 48% in Q2 2026 (S-1, p. 159 to 160). That is the efficiency story Anthropic wants investors to see.
The forward commitments are the part that should keep you up at night. Pages 171 and 172 list the big contracts:
Broadcom: five-year equipment leases for TPU hardware with rent of about $161.2 billion, excluding interest.
SpaceXAI: up to $120.5 billion for NVIDIA-powered compute through 2029, about $3.1 billion a month once fully delivered, with 90-day cancellation rights after the initial periods.
Google: at least about $114.5 billion between April 2026 and July 2033, plus an estimated $125 billion to $150 billion of additional TPU compute for 2028 to 2031.
Amazon: at least $110.0 billion between May 2026 and April 2036.
Microsoft: at least $44.9 billion between November 2026 and May 2033.
Nscale: up to about $44.6 billion through 2033.
Lambda: about $41.3 billion through 2034.
AMD: more than $20.0 billion if Anthropic buys its full initial Helios capacity.
The first seven add up to roughly $637 billion. Add AMD and the extra Google TPU estimate and you land between $782 billion and $807 billion. These are our sums. They mix minimum commitments with “up to” ceilings, so treat them as an order of magnitude.
Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI, formerly X.AI LLC according to the S-1 (p. 172), is now one of Anthropic’s largest landlords. A year ago that sentence would have sounded like satire.
Anthropic is also moving to what it calls Anthropic Direct: leasing chips and hosting them in dedicated facilities, separating data center commitments from accelerator commitments (S-1, p. 138). It is a hyperscaler playbook, run by a five-year-old company.
The funding side matches the scale. Anthropic had raised $141.1 billion in aggregate by June 30, 2026, and held $112.4 billion of cash and cash equivalents plus $19.3 billion of short-term investments (S-1, p. 11). It also has $77 billion of undrawn note facilities from Google, Amazon and Broadcom (S-1, p. 166).
4. How Many Customers Does Anthropic Have? The Engine Behind 900% Net Revenue Retention
Net Revenue Retention of about 900% sounds like a typo. The S-1 defines it as revenue from customers in the latest quarter divided by their revenue in the same quarter a year earlier, excluding Claude Pro and Max subscribers (S-1, p. 3 and p. 5). In plain terms, the average business customer from a year ago now spends about nine times as much.
The ladder of big customers, according to the S-1 (p. 143):
About 20 customers above $100,000 at the end of 2023
About 200 at the end of 2024
About 1,500 at the end of 2025
More than 11,900 by September 30, 2026
More than 1,900 customers pay $1 million or more a year, and about 250 pay $10 million or more (S-1, p. 9 to 10). Every Fortune 10 company is a $100,000+ customer (S-1, p. 195).
Concentration is real and falling. The top five customers made up about 25% of revenue in the nine months to September 30, 2026, and the largest single customer stayed below 10% (S-1, p. 57). About 79% of Q3 2026 revenue came from outside the top five, up from about 64% in Q1 2026 (S-1, p. 144).
The upside case sits in one line: revenue from Anthropic’s Fortune 500 customers equals less than 0.1% of those companies’ total expenses on average (S-1, p. 143). The top 10 Fortune 500 customers spend over eight times that share, still under 1% of their expenses (S-1, p. 143).
Anthropic ran this with about 5,300 employees as of September 30, 2026 (S-1, p. 230). Trailing revenue per employee was over $6.6 million, up from $1.4 million a year earlier (S-1, p. 11).
Product velocity drives all of it. Model versions released in the six months to September 30, 2026 produced over 80% of Q3 revenue (S-1, p. 144). Anthropic sells the frontier, and the frontier expires fast.
5. Who Controls Anthropic? Two Holders Steer the Company
Public shareholders will own the economics, while two other holders steer the company.
Founder LLC (Class F): one share, held by an LLC of the seven co-founders, carrying 50.1% of the total vote on general matters, with zero economic rights (S-1, cover page).
Long-Term Benefit Trust (Class T): five financially disinterested Trustees who elect and remove the Class T directors, a majority of the board (S-1, p. 108, p. 245).
Class A: one vote per share, sharing the remaining 49.9% of the vote (S-1, p. 290).
Class N: economic shares with zero votes, held mainly by strategic partners, converting to Class A when sold to an unaffiliated buyer (S-1, cover page).
Class E: issued to employees, excluding co-founders, voting only on limited matters (S-1, cover page).
Amazon and Google will each hold more than 5% of outstanding capital stock after the conversions, mostly in non-voting Class N stock (S-1, p. 117). Amazon’s note conversions are capped at 12% of capitalization and Google’s issuances at 14.99%, unless they waive the caps (S-1, p. 165, p. 169). Google also holds an option to buy up to $10 billion of Class N stock alongside the IPO (S-1, p. 169).
Anthropic qualifies as a “controlled company” under Nasdaq rules and will use the related governance exemptions (S-1, cover page).
The public-benefit layer goes further than any big tech IPO before it. Anthropic contributed 846,840,960 Class N shares, about 5% of fully diluted shares, to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, and its board can add up to 2% more each time the share price rises 50% above the prior milestone (S-1, p. 13). Each co-founder has pledged 80% of their personal equity to philanthropy (S-1, p. 13).
The risk section matches the ambition. Risk factors run from page 26 to page 120 of the prospectus. Anthropic writes that models, “including our own, have exhibited, and may in the future exhibit, unexpected strategic or self-preserving behaviors,” including “behavior resembling blackmail” (S-1, p. 47).
There is also live political risk. The Department of War designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk in 2026, and on September 25, 2026 a split D.C. Circuit panel upheld that designation under Section 4713. Anthropic has asked the full court to rehear the case (S-1, p. 243).
6. Anthropic IPO Valuation: How It Stacks Up Against Google, Facebook and SpaceX
The S-1 leaves the valuation and the price range blank, so every figure below is a press report attributed to its outlet:
Anthropic raised at a $965 billion valuation in May 2026, according to CNBC.
NBC News reports the offering could value Anthropic at more than $2 trillion (NBC News).
Reuters reports some investors value Anthropic at about $1.5 trillion and that it may seek to raise as much as $100 billion (Reuters via Yahoo Finance).
The share prices inside the filing show how fast private investors re-rated the company. Series E-1 sold at $56.09 a share in early 2025, Series F-1 at $140.97 in August and September 2025, Series G-1 at $259.14 in early 2026, and Series H-1 at $589.01 in May and June 2026 (S-1, p. 283 to 284). That is a 10.5x step-up in price per share in about 15 months.
Now compare with landmark tech IPOs, using each company’s own S-1 for revenue.
Facebook (2012): 2011 revenue of $3,711 million, up 88% (S-1). IPO valuation of $104 billion (TechCrunch), about 28x revenue.
Anthropic (2026): 2025 revenue of $4,585 million, up 1,088%, and trailing revenue of $19.7 billion through June 30, 2026 (S-1, p. 151, p. 158). At the $1.5 trillion Reuters figure, that is about 76x trailing revenue and about 32x the Q2 annualized pace. At $2 trillion, the multiples are about 101x and 43x.
The multiples are our math on reported valuations. Anthropic looks expensive on trailing revenue and cheap on its current pace. The whole debate is which of those two numbers you believe will hold.
OpenAI is the obvious benchmark. OpenAI reported $6.7 billion of revenue in the June quarter, up 18% from $5.7 billion in the first quarter, according to the WSJ. Anthropic did $11.6 billion in the same quarter, up 144%. Reuters reported OpenAI’s annualized revenue was close to $50 billion in September and noted that OpenAI and Anthropic count cloud-partner sales differently (Reuters via Investing.com).
7. Anthropic IPO Date: When Will ANT Start Trading?
The S-1 leaves the trading date open. Shares can only be sold after the SEC declares the registration statement effective, and the next step is an amended S-1 with a price range and share count.
NBC News reports the offering is widely expected in mid-November 2026. Anthropic first filed confidentially in June 2026, according to CNBC.
Two mechanics matter for anyone planning to buy:
Lock-up: insiders are locked for 180 days after the prospectus date, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley can release shares early (S-1, p. 118 to 119, p. 318).
Use of proceeds: general corporate purposes, including compute and infrastructure, plus tax withholding on the RSU settlement (S-1, p. 125).
8. What This Means for Founders, VCs and the AI Market
For founders building on Claude. Your supplier just showed you its cost curve. Anthropic cut customer cost per task by about 40% from Claude Opus 5 to Opus 5.5 and says its compute efficiency preserves its margins (S-1, p. 11). Plan for prices per task to keep falling and for your gross margin to depend on how fast you adopt each new model. Models released in the prior six months drove over 80% of Anthropic’s Q3 2026 revenue (S-1, p. 144), so your stack will churn at the same speed.
For founders building against Claude. Over 50% of Anthropic’s $100,000+ customers now use both the Claude Platform and at least one first-party app, up from about 30% in Q4 2025 (S-1, p. 135). Claude Code and Claude Cowork move Anthropic up the stack. Pick workflows where your proprietary data and distribution give you the edge.
For VCs. The convertible notes and SAFEs in this filing generated $72.4 billion of first-half losses (S-1, p. 23). Structure determines what the income statement looks like at IPO, and every investor in a fast-rising company should model how its instruments mark to market. The Series E to Series H price ladder also shows what the best AI rounds paid for in 2025: speed of revenue compounding.
For the AI market. The compute bill turns AI labs into infrastructure companies. Roughly $637 billion of named contracts against $19.7 billion of trailing revenue (our sums from S-1 p. 158 and p. 171 to 172) means the bet only works if the curve in Exhibit 2 keeps bending upward. Cloud providers and neoclouds such as Nscale and Lambda now carry Anthropic’s growth inside their own backlogs.
The founder lesson I keep coming back to is simple. Anthropic sold the most capable model to developers first and kept the vote. Speed and control can coexist when your product is far enough ahead.
FAQs
What is Anthropic’s stock ticker? Anthropic plans to list its Class A common stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol ANT, according to the S-1 it filed with the SEC on October 26, 2026. The company first filed confidentially in June 2026, according to CNBC.
When will Anthropic stock start trading? Anthropic stock is widely expected to start trading in mid-November 2026, according to NBC News, because the S-1 filed on October 26, 2026 leaves the date open. Shares can only be sold after the SEC declares the registration statement effective and the company completes its roadshow with investors.
What is Anthropic’s IPO valuation? NBC News reports the Anthropic IPO could value the company at more than $2 trillion, while the S-1 itself leaves the valuation and price range blank. Anthropic last raised funds at a $965 billion valuation in May 2026, according to CNBC.
How much revenue does Anthropic make? Anthropic reported $16.29 billion of revenue in the six months ended June 30, 2026, up from $1.16 billion a year earlier, according to the S-1. Full-year 2025 revenue was $4.59 billion, and second-quarter 2026 revenue alone was $11.56 billion.
Is Anthropic profitable? Anthropic is still loss-making on a GAAP basis, with an $80.7 billion net loss for the first half of 2026, according to the S-1. Of that, $72.4 billion came from fair-value changes on convertible notes and SAFEs as the valuation rose, while the operating loss narrowed to $693 million and the second quarter produced $974 million of operating income.
Who controls Anthropic after the IPO? Anthropic’s seven co-founders will control 50.1% of the vote through a single Class F share held by a Founder LLC, according to the S-1. The Long-Term Benefit Trust elects the Class T directors, who form a majority of the board, and public Class A holders share the remaining 49.9% of the vote.
How much of Anthropic do Amazon and Google own? Amazon and Google will each hold more than 5% of Anthropic’s outstanding capital stock after the IPO conversions, according to the S-1, mostly as non-voting Class N stock. Amazon’s note conversions are capped at 12% of capitalization and Google’s share issuances at 14.99%, and the exact share counts stay blank until the amended filing.
How can I buy Anthropic stock? Investors can buy Anthropic stock through a broker once ANT starts trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market, according to the S-1 filed on October 26, 2026, which the SEC first has to declare effective. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley lead the 22-bank underwriting syndicate, according to the S-1, and some brokers may offer IPO allocations to clients before trading begins.
Would you buy ANT on day one, or wait for the first earnings report to see whether the June quarter was the peak or the base? Tell me in the comments.
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