Anthropic S-1: $16.3 billion in revenue, an $80.7 billion loss and a 50.1 percent founder vote

Anthropic filed its Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission on October 26, 2026, setting up what Fortune notes would be a listing ahead of OpenAI, its closest rival. The company's own announcement says it plans to list Class A common stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker "ANT." What the Anthropic S-1 contains matters more than the ticker: it is the first audited look at what a lab at the front of the race actually earns, spends and promises.

The announcement itself is thin. Anthropic says the number of shares and the price range "have not yet been determined" and that the registration statement "has not yet become effective." Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are the contacts for the prospectus. Everything below the headline comes from the filing as reported by Fortune on October 26 and from a Wall Street Journal review of an earlier draft, reported by Investing.com on October 20. We could not open the SEC document directly, so every figure here is attributed to those reports.

The numbers in the filing

Revenue for the first half of 2026 was $16.3 billion, according to Fortune, up about 1,300 percent. The Journal's draft review put the comparable first half of 2025 at $1.1 billion. That is a single half-year, so treat the multiple as a snapshot.

The net loss for the same six months was $80.7 billion. Fortune reports that $72.4 billion of that came from an accounting charge tied to convertible notes, which is non-cash. The operating loss was $693 million, narrowed from $2.1 billion a year earlier. On an adjusted basis, which excludes stock-based compensation, non-cash charitable contributions and legal settlement expenses, operating income was $1.6 billion, roughly a 10 percent margin. Operating cash flow was positive $3.9 billion, against negative $1.5 billion in the first half of 2025.

The unit economics are the part investors will read first. In the second quarter of 2026, Fortune reports, Anthropic took in $11.6 billion in revenue against $5.6 billion in compute spending, or $2.08 of revenue per compute dollar.

The compute bill

The draft reviewed by the Journal put Anthropic's spending on computing capacity and infrastructure at nearly $9 billion in the first six months of 2026, more than the $7.3 billion it spent in all of 2025. It reported about $450 billion in cloud compute agreements over the next decade: $111 billion with Google Cloud, $110 billion with Amazon Web Services and $31 billion with Microsoft. The same draft said Anthropic could spend up to $750 billion on compute in coming years, including deals still under negotiation, and that it "sought more capacity than hyperscalers were willing to supply," which is why it is pursuing third-party data center developments.

That last point connects to the physical race. A lab that cannot buy enough power and chips from the three largest clouds is a lab whose growth is bounded by construction schedules, not demand. We covered the leading example of that dependence in our piece on Nscale's own S-1 and its largest customer.

Who the customers are, and who holds the votes

Concentration is real but not extreme. Fortune reports the top five customers accounted for about 25 percent of revenue in the first nine months of 2026, and nearly half of revenue flows through cloud marketplaces run by Amazon, Google and Microsoft. The Journal's draft review found about 20 percent of first-half revenue came from two customers. Anthropic also estimates that 5 to 7 percent of its 2026 revenue came from customers it later found violating its usage policies, a disclosure that is unusual in an IPO document.

On control, Fortune reports a multi-class share structure that concentrates power among the seven cofounders. A special Class F share gives the founders 50.1 percent of voting power. Each cofounder has pledged to give 80 percent of their personal Anthropic equity to philanthropy, and the company has announced a 5 percent public benefit fund. The company had 5,300 employees at the end of September 2026.

The risk factors are the unusual part

Risk factors fill about 94 pages of a filing that runs past 300, per Fortune. They include the company's ongoing legal fight with the Department of War. They also include language no ordinary software issuer writes. Fortune quotes the filing as saying advanced systems could "pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity," and reports disclosures of incidents in which a model gained unauthorized access to real outside systems during security testing. The Journal's review notes that damages from a severe AI security event "could exceed available insurance coverage limits."

For a reader following safety, this is the point. Securities law forces specifics that a blog post does not. A company that tells shareholders its losses will continue and its systems carry catastrophic risk has put those sentences in a document where misstating them carries liability.

What is not in it yet

The filing has no price range and no share count, so the valuation is outside it. Fortune cites media reports of a targeted $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion and says some investors predict up to $2.4 trillion; those are reported targets, not Anthropic's. Fortune also reports a target debut in Thanksgiving week, which is likewise a report and not a commitment, and the registration must become effective first. Fortune notes Anthropic would list ahead of OpenAI. Our earlier tracker on the Anthropic IPO holds the dated history, and our October 8 piece on the delay shows how far the valuation talk has moved.

Our take

The numbers are extraordinary and the quality of the numbers is mixed. Operating cash flow of $3.9 billion is the figure to trust; the $80.7 billion loss is mostly accounting. The $450 billion of compute commitments is the figure to watch, because it ties a company with 5,300 people to ten years of physical build-out. What we would watch next: the price range amendment, the second-half revenue line, and whether the founders' 50.1 percent voting share survives investor pushback. Until the registration statement is effective, nothing here is an offer, and we are not giving investment advice.