Anthropic filed its public registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, taking the formal step toward an initial public offering on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol ANT. The Form S-1 discloses revenue of $16.3 billion for the first half of 2026, up roughly 1,300 percent year on year, a net loss of $80.7 billion over the same period, and a plan to spend at least $542 billion on data centres in the coming years. The listing, which could come as soon as November, is expected to be one of the largest ever.
The headline loss is smaller than it looks. According to reporting on the prospectus, about $72 billion of the $80.7 billion came from accounting changes in the value of convertible bonds issued to raise money, not from operations. On an adjusted basis, Anthropic says operating income swung to positive $1.6 billion in the half, from a $1.8 billion loss a year earlier, a turn Moody's called "a strong positive for the AI ecosystem." The company told investors it spent $9 billion on compute and infrastructure in the first half alone, more than the $7.3 billion it spent in all of 2025, and has lined up cloud commitments of $450 billion over the next decade that could rise to $750 billion.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei and a group of researchers who left OpenAI over concerns about how safely it was building AI. Five years on, the prospectus frames the technology in sweeping terms, predicting "abundance of AI" that will transform the global economy more than industrialisation, electricity, semiconductors and the internet combined. It also carries more than 90 pages of risk factors, among them the possibility that its models develop faster than it can keep them safe, that they could be used to cause harm or act harmfully on their own, and that the Trump administration could inflict "material revenue losses." Amazon remains a major backer and Alphabet is set to be a larger shareholder.
The filing lands on a market that has turned jittery about AI. Reports earlier in October said Anthropic might cut its target valuation from $2 trillion to $1.5 trillion amid worries about slowing revenue growth and a possible bubble; even the lower figure would make it the third-largest IPO on record, behind Saudi Aramco and SpaceX. Neoclouds such as CoreWeave and Nebius have shed more than 30 percent of their value this month as credit risk rises across the data-centre business, the same build-out Anthropic is committing hundreds of billions to fund.
The move also sharpens the contrast with OpenAI, which AI Daily covered when Anthropic's plans firmed up on October 24. Sam Altman has called a 2026 listing "ill-advised" given safety concerns and OpenAI's nonprofit-and-for-profit structure, and the Financial Times reported OpenAI sought a $1.4 trillion valuation in private pitch meetings. By filing first, Anthropic claims the market's attention for the sector's defining debut, while inheriting the scrutiny that comes with public books. Two unresolved threads sit in the prospectus itself: about a fifth of revenue reportedly comes from just two customers, and Anthropic's running disputes with the Pentagon, which blacklisted it as a "supply chain risk" after it refused certain military uses, remain in federal court.