In its first quarter as a profitable operating business, Anthropic booked $974 million of operating income. Days later it filed to go public.
The registration statement landed with the SEC on October 26. Anthropic wants its Class A shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker ANT, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading a syndicate of 22 banks. Price range, share count and size of the raise are all blank. So is the run-rate revenue figure. Any valuation you read today is press talk, not filing.
A loss that is mostly bookkeeping
The headline number is ugly: an $80.7 billion net loss for the first half of 2026. Look closer and most of it evaporates. About $72,388 million came from non-cash fair-value changes on convertible notes, derivative liabilities and SAFEs. Operating losses for the six months were $690 million.
Revenue tells the other half. Anthropic reported $16.3 billion for the six months to June 30, against $1.16 billion a year earlier. The filing puts growth at 1,300%, a shade under the 1,304% CNBC quoted. The second quarter alone brought in $11.56 billion, more than the roughly $5.0 billion the company earned across 2023, 2024 and 2025 combined. Compute and infrastructure costs rose 300% in that quarter, far slower than sales.
Customers spending $100,000 or more a year grew from over 950 to over 11,900 in twelve months. Net revenue retention sits near 900%.
Where the money goes
Compute is the other big line. The filing names contracts with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Broadcom, Nscale, Lambda and SpaceX.AI, and they add up to roughly $637 billion. The SpaceX.AI deal alone reaches $120.5 billion by 2029, up from the $84.5 billion reported earlier.
Control matters too. Seven co-founders will hold 50.1% of the vote through a single Class F share, and the Long-Term Benefit Trust elects a majority of the board. Public shareholders would be buying into a company they cannot outvote.
The bubble question lands the same week
The timing is awkward. Elon Musk said lenders are losing appetite for AI data center specialists and that many of the more than 200 neo-cloud companies will be culled or merged. CoreWeave, Nebius, IREN and Applied Digital fell across the board, and CalPERS said it would trim its tech holdings.
Earnings added to the unease. Alphabet and Microsoft both reported on October 28, and both showed cloud booming. Google Cloud revenue rose 103% to $30.7 billion. Yet Alphabet fell more than 10% because capital spending jumped to $51.36 billion and free cash flow slid to negative $9.07 billion. Microsoft, with Azure up 48% to $33.2 billion, gained 4%. Investors, it seems, now ask how fast the cash comes back.
Debt is carrying much of the build-out. SpaceX closed about $40 billion of financing through a firm tied to Apollo, and Broadcom set up a vehicle of up to $63 billion with Bank of America, Blackstone, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley to buy chips for Anthropic. Nvidia is reportedly weighing credit guarantees for Nscale’s borrowing.
The offering cannot price until the registration statement becomes effective. Until then, the blanks stay blank.
Sources
- This Week's Top 10 AI News — Anthropic's Largest IPO Filing in History and the Intensifying AI Bubble Debate｜Yasunori Shigeta
- Inside Anthropic's S-1: $16.3B in Six Months and a 50.1% Founder Vote
- Anthropic files S-1 with the SEC for proposed initial public offering
Photo: Number 10 (OGL 3)
