Anthropic officially files for blockbuster IPO

Anthropic, the AI giant behind Claude, officially filed its public S-1 prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday 26 October 2026.

This filing is the starting gun on what could lead to the largest IPO in history, as the booming AI sector approached a long-awaited and crucial milestone for the future of the industry.

Anthropic confirmed that it intends to list its Class A common stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “ANT.”

It said that the number of shares of Class A common stock to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined.

Anthropic said it would issue five different classes of shares, including a single Class F stock that will be held in a company controlled by Anthropic’s founders and will control 50.1% of the voting power.

Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust (LTBT) is designed to ensure the company is governed by balancing three goals: shareholder interest, those affected materially by its conduct, and the purpose of the company, which it says is “the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity”.

This LTBT is an independent body comprised of trustees and will receive its own Class T shares that will allow it to elect and remove the majority of directors on the company’s board of directors.

Soaring revenue and promises of principle

In its prospectus, Anthropic revealed that its revenue has soared to $16.3 billion in the six months to June 2026, compared to $1.2 billion in the same period last year.

The vast majority ($13 billion) of this revenue was consumption-based, with $3.2 billion generated from subscriptions. $11.8 billion of Anthropic’s revenue was generated from customers in the United States, with the remainder billed to international customers.

The company also posted an operating loss of $693 million for the first half of 2026, which is a significant drop from the $2.3 billion loss it recorded in the same period in 2025.

Anthropic was not shy about the potential of AI in its prospectus, likening the acceleration of the technology’s capabilities and economic value to the phenomenon of Moore’s law, which states that the computing power of chips doubles every 12 to 18 months.

“We believe that the impact of an exponential in machine cognition will be vastly greater even than that of the exponential in computer chips,” the company said.

“It is Anthropic’s thesis that the exponential in cognition is likely to continue, eventually reaching the level of what we have called ‘a country of geniuses in a data centre’.”

Of course, Moore’s law eventually proved to be an inaccurate predictor for future computing growth: the exponential increases in capabilities it promised eventually slowed down as it became harder to shrink chips down.

The company said that before it began the IPO process, it fielded advice from many business leaders, and it has followed the adage of “never let your company be worth a dollar more than it is actually worth”, which its founders were told many times.

Anthropic also said that it is committed to continuing to uphold its values even if this is costly commercially, pointing to its previous lockdown of Claude Mythos as an example of forgoing revenue to mitigate negative impact on the world at large.

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