Highly anticipated: Anthropic has officially filed to go public. The Claude maker submitted its S-1 to the SEC on Monday and plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker "ANT." The share count and price range are still unknown, but earlier reporting puts the target raise at up to $100 billion, and the listing is expected before Thanksgiving.
Anthropic's filing opens 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 tries to back that claim up with numbers, while also spelling out, at unusual length, how things could go wrong.
Anthropic generated $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026, up from $1.2 billion a year earlier. The second quarter alone brought in $11.6 billion. The most telling figure from a tech standpoint is this: Q2 revenue grew 1,368% year over year, while compute and infrastructure expenses grew 300%. In other words, serving Claude is getting cheaper much faster than demand is rising.
The company says Claude Opus 5.5 cut customer cost per task by about 40% compared to Opus 5, and by one analyst's math, Anthropic went from selling inference at a loss in late 2025 to earning about $2 for every dollar of compute in Q2.
On paper, Anthropic also lost $80.7 billion in the first half, but that number says more about its soaring valuation than about what it spent. About $72 billion of that comes from investor notes, held by backers like Amazon, that will turn into shares when the company goes public.
As Anthropic's valuation climbed, those future shares became more valuable, and accounting rules require the company to book that increase as a loss, even though no money actually left the building. The cost of running the business itself produced a much smaller $693 million loss.
Largest IPOs in history, by deal size
| Rank | Company (year) | Deal size |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Anthropic (2026)* | ~$100.0B |
| 2 | SpaceX (2026) | $75.0B |
| 3 | SK Hynix (2026) | $26.5B |
| 4 | Saudi Aramco (2019) | $25.6B |
| 5 | Alibaba (2014) | $21.8B |
*Anthropic IPO estimate. Source: Renaissance Capital
Claude's adoption is heavily enterprise-driven. More than 11,900 customers pay Anthropic at least $100,000 a year, about 250 pay more than $10 million, and over half the Fortune 500 is on its client list.
Anthropic says it treats compute as a single pool spread across AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, Nvidia GPUs and AMD GPUs, shifting capacity for research, training, internal use, and customers depending on where it's most productive.
The financial commitments behind that compute pool are enormous, totaling more than $600 billion across many partners and stretching into the 2030s. Google is the largest, with at least $114.5 billion committed plus up to $150 billion more in TPU purchases planned between 2028 and 2031. A lease agreement with Broadcom is worth $161.2 billion, and the SpaceXAI deal for Nvidia GPU capacity runs up to $120.5 billion.
An interesting claim in the S-1 is what Anthropic calls "closing the loop." Claude now helps run experiments, generate training data, automate evaluations and safety audits, and write code for its own successors. The company describes this as one of its biggest structural advantages, but also a risk. Some 94 pages of the filing are dedicated to risk factors, including the possibility that its models could show "self-preserving" behavior.
On the product side, the filing calls Claude Code the clearest example of autonomous AI work so far, noting that NASA engineers used it to plan the first AI-planned drive of the Perseverance rover on Mars. Claude Cowork, which launched as a preview in January, is now being folded into the main Claude app and is being adopted faster than Claude Code was at the same stage.
As for who will run Anthropic after the IPO, the answer is mostly the same people. A single share held by the seven co-founders carries 50.1% of the shareholder vote. Each co-founder holds roughly 240 million shares, worth about $14 billion at the last private round price, and all seven have pledged to give away 80% of their equity, though the filing notes those pledges aren't legally binding.
Anthropic files to go public, and it could be the biggest IPO ever
