Anthropic files for IPO with $16.3B half-year revenue

You can now read the books of the company behind Claude. The growth is real. The control structure is the surprise.

Anthropic said it filed a Form S-1 with the SEC on Oct. 26 to list its Class A stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker ANT. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are named for the prospectus. The share count and price range are not set, and the registration is not yet effective.

The prospectus puts revenue for the first six months of 2026 at:

$16.3 billion, up from $1.2 billion a year earlier.

The revenue is real, and most of it is tokens

The filing gives annual revenue of $41 million in 2023, $386 million in 2024 and $4.6 billion in 2025.

Most of it is metered. Consumption-based revenue, what customers pay per token, was $13.1 billion in the first half of 2026, or 80% of the total. Subscriptions brought in $3.2 billion, or 20%.

Almost half arrives through someone else's cloud. Sales through cloud provider marketplaces were 48% of revenue in the first half, up from 11% in 2023.

The customer base widened. Customers paying $100,000 or more over a trailing year went from more than 950 to more than 11,900 between Sept. 30, 2025 and Sept. 30, 2026, Anthropic says, and no single customer was more than 10% of revenue in the first nine months of 2026.

The loss is mostly paper, and the founders keep the votes

The net loss looks alarming. Anthropic reports a net loss of $80.7 billion for the first half of 2026. Of that, $72.4 billion is a change in the fair value of convertible notes, derivatives and SAFEs, an accounting charge rather than cash out the door.

The operating loss tells you more. It was $693 million in the first half, down from $2.1 billion a year earlier. Anthropic's own adjusted measure shows $1.6 billion of operating income.

Control is the other surprise. A Founder LLC will hold Class F stock carrying 50.1% of the total voting power and no economic rights, the filing says. The Long-Term Benefit Trust, a panel of financially disinterested trustees, elects Class T directors who will form a board majority. Anthropic calls itself a "controlled company" under Nasdaq rules.

Here's the thing. Public shareholders get the upside and very little say. Anthropic is telling you that up front, and the market will price it.

What a public Anthropic means if you build on Claude

Your supplier is about to report every quarter. That cuts both ways.

The good part: you get regular, filed numbers on growth, margins and compute. The filing says Anthropic runs Claude across AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, Nvidia GPUs and AMD GPUs, and it describes take-or-pay compute agreements that oblige it to pay for capacity whether it uses it or not. It also discloses the right to issue up to $42.0 billion of convertible notes to Broadcom to finance chips.

The other part: those fixed commitments need revenue to cover them. The filing leaves the total committed compute spend blank for now. Pricing, rate limits and plan packaging will be read against those quarterly numbers.

On Oct. 15, TopFive reported that Anthropic told investors its Q3 revenue hit $16.8 billion. The S-1 puts figures like these in a document filed with the SEC, where a misstatement carries legal liability.

Watch the blanks fill in

Before any shares can sell, an amended S-1 has to add the price range and the share count, and the committed compute total is still blank too. Those numbers decide what the market thinks Anthropic is worth, and how much room it has on price.

Read the next amendment. Then read your contract.