Anthropic Files for Nasdaq IPO After 14-Fold Revenue Jump

Anthropic booked $16.29 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026, up from $1.16 billion a year earlier, according to the S-1 filing the Claude maker submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday (26 October).

The company applied to list Class A shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol ANT. It did not disclose share count, price range or valuation. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley headed the underwriter list. Reuters and other outlets noted the offering could rival SpaceX's record June 2026 listing.

Anthropic submitted its paperwork confidentially in June, which let the SEC review figures before public release. Yesterday's filing offered the first detailed public look at the company's finances. For context on the growth rate: H1 2026 revenue already exceeds full-year 2025 revenue of $4.59 billion by more than three and a half times.

What do the numbers show?

The revenue surge came with heavy infrastructure costs. Cost of revenue rose to $2.38 billion from just over $1 billion, and compute and infrastructure accounted for almost all of it. Anthropic cautioned that operating margins will fluctuate as more capacity comes online.

The company booked a net loss of $80.7 billion in H1. That figure needs unpacking: $72.4 billion of it reflected non-cash charges from revaluing convertible notes and similar instruments as its valuation rose, not cash burn from operations.

How deep are the cloud commitments?

The filing lays out the commercial architecture behind the models. Anthropic runs workloads on Amazon Web Services Trainium chips, Google Tensor Processing Units, and GPUs from Nvidia and AMD. It also pays fees to sell Claude through AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. The disclosed commitments are:

• At least $110 billion to Amazon cloud services through April 2036
• Up to $120.5 billion with SpaceX through 2029
• $114.5 billion to Google through 2033
• $44.9 billion to Microsoft through May 2033

Spread across the contract terms, those deals average roughly $40 billion per year in combined commitments. That scale explains why supplier relationships carry their own risk section in the filing. Amazon holds convertible notes that will convert into non-voting Class N shares at the IPO, subject to an ownership cap.

What risks did Anthropic flag?

Anthropic warned that some cloud suppliers are developing rival AI models and could restrict, reprice or cut off its access to computing capacity. The concern is structural: the company depends on infrastructure owned by companies it competes with.

The risk factors extend beyond suppliers. Anthropic noted criminals have already used AI in cyberattacks and warned that misuse in biology could cause greater harm. The filing also raised the possibility that AI could concentrate power and destabilise geopolitics.

Two technical warnings stand out for practitioners. Anthropic increasingly uses its own models to develop their successors, and it noted those new versions' capabilities could advance faster than safety measures. It also cautioned that AI systems could act independently in harmful ways if they fail to follow intended goals — an unusually direct acknowledgment of alignment risk in an SEC document.

What happens next in the AI listing race?

Rival OpenAI confidentially filed its own US IPO paperwork in June but has delayed the listing until early next year. Anthropic's public filing puts it ahead in the queue, and its final pricing, share count and debut timing now rest with the SEC review process and market conditions.