Anthropic before the listing: what the prospectus actually holds

On 26 October 2026 Anthropic opened its registration process with the US securities regulator SEC. The prospectus carries form S-1, is 14.2 MB, is slated for the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT and comes from a Delaware public benefit corporation. A registration statement is not a press release: it has to be written under penalty of perjury, and its numbers carry the sign-off of a law firm and auditors. That is exactly what makes the document usable for anyone who buys or runs AI services, because it is the first hard financial statement from a frontier lab. We read the tables in the full text and recounted them ourselves, as of 27 October 2026. A read-only view of the raw filing is all it takes, and every figure below carries its origin.

Anthropic builds the frontier models of the Claude series and sells most of them through the three large cloud providers: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Billing runs on consumption, so per processed token, plus committed volumes. The prospectus calls this consumption-based pricing, and that explains both sides of the story: why revenue in this business can run so fast, and why compute cost on the other side of the ledger runs just as fast.

Anthropic Claude mark — Anthropic is a Delaware public benefit corporation. The Nasdaq ticker is in the prospectus: ANT. (Quelle: Anthropic / Wikimedia, public domain)

The revenue curve

Metric	2023	2024	2025	H1 2025	H1 2026
Revenue in million USD	41	386	4,585	1,163	16,286
Operating loss in million USD	-551	-2,980	-8,060	-2,135	-693
Adjusted operating income in million USD	-522	-2,788	-4,854	-1,849	1,618
Net income or loss in million USD	-1,531	-8,309	-41,965	-12,969	-80,748

Read from the comparison tables of the S-1, an SEC form filed on 26 Oct 2026, table transcribed by us on 27 Oct 2026.

The jump the coverage leads with is in the table then: from 1,163 to 16,286 million dollars in one year, fourteen times. By quarter it is steeper still: the second quarter of 2026 alone brings 11,555 million dollars, after 4,731 million in the first quarter. Add the two quarters and you get the half-year total; the table holds.

The first half of 2026 is above three times the whole prior year. The prospectus restates nothing into full-year rates, so the axis stays mixed periods. (Quelle: Anthropic S-1 of 26 Oct 2026)

On margin, one caveat belongs first: Anthropic no longer presents a gross margin in the prospectus. Expenses are classified by nature rather than by function, so a clean gross margin cannot be formed from it. "Margin" here can only mean operating margin, and that does not double, it flips sign: from minus 184 percent in the first half of 2025 to minus 4 percent in the first half of 2026. In the company's own non-GAAP view, minus 159 percent becomes plus 10 percent for the half-year, and the second quarter of 2026 shows 19 percent there, on 2,235 million dollars of adjusted operating income. The quarterly view turns positive a quarter before the half-year one does.

The operating loss grows along with revenue, just slower. The half-year figures sit in the table above; on the same axis they would vanish next to the annual bars. (Quelle: Anthropic S-1 of 26 Oct 2026)

The loss and what is actually inside it

80.7 billion dollars of net loss in six months against 16.3 billion of revenue is a shock figure at first look. The composition dissolves it: the line "change in fair value of convertible notes, derivatives and SAFEs" alone costs 72.388 billion dollars, plus 8.757 billion of other expense net. Both are valuation amounts from the funding rounds, not money leaving the bank. The operating loss of the same six months is 693 million dollars, and the second quarter of 2026 already ends above the operating line: 974 million dollars of operating income on 11,555 million of revenue. Under US standards the quarter is still a heavy loss, 66.3 billion, almost entirely the mark-to-market on the convertible notes.

Anthropic itself reports in non-GAAP metrics and publishes the reconciliations in the prospectus. Adjusted operating income there means: operating loss excluding stock-based compensation, non-cash charitable contributions and a settlement payment from a copyright case. Adjusted net income additionally excludes the fair-value changes of the financing instruments. Those definitions sit in the document's glossary, we copied them from there instead of inventing them.

The items add up to about 1.1 billion more than the reported net loss of 80.748 billion. The prospectus shows 1.111 billion of interest income in the same six months, which offsets inside the total. (Quelle: Anthropic S-1 of 26 Oct 2026)

What the business depends on

The prospectus is more candid about its dependencies than any vendor marketing page, because it has to be. Three points from it matter for procurement.

Shown is the share of revenue that does not run through the cloud providers' marketplaces. The rest does; the counter-reading is in the text. (Quelle: Anthropic S-1 of 26 Oct 2026 (shares) + Reuters coverage for context)

First, a growing share of revenue runs through cloud marketplaces: 48 percent in the first half of 2026, after 32 percent in fiscal 2024 and 11 percent in 2023. Anyone buying Anthropic through AWS or Google Cloud sits in the same dependency chain as the vendor itself, including its open receivables from those providers.

Second, compute: compute and infrastructure is the largest cost block at 8,945 million dollars in the first half of 2026, which is 55 percent of revenue, down from 201 percent in the first half of 2025. In relative terms the business gets lighter, in absolute terms it stays a bill that depends on purchase prices for accelerator hardware and on how fully that hardware is used. The prospectus names supply commitments for AMD's coming MI450 generation together with the AMD Helios, plus multi-chip operation: AWS Trainium, Google TPU, NVIDIA and AMD accelerators. Anyone buying model services should know their prices carry the pricing power of the same two hardware vendors that shape our own systems too. Those who want the models in the house rather than on a price list will find our setups on the corporate LLM service page.

Third, the purchase commitments. Total non-cancellable contractual commitments rise from roughly 54.6 billion dollars at the end of 2025 to roughly 265.6 billion dollars as of 30 June 2026, with terms up to 20 years. After the last balance-sheet date further commitments arrive, which the prospectus puts at "approximately 417 billion dollars" of minimum payments, plus an estimated 125 to 150 billion dollars for terms not yet finalised. These are different time windows, anyone adding them up calculates wrong. We quoted both amounts separately instead of building an invented total.

Two balance-sheet dates, one order of magnitude. Not included are the commitments signed after the last reporting date, around 417 billion USD of minimum payments, because their windows run beyond the 20 years of the table. (Quelle: Anthropic S-1 of 26 Oct 2026)

What stays open

The most interesting field in the prospectus says: nothing. The price range, the number of shares offered and with it any valuation are blank fields in the filed version. So is the reference metric an IPO document usually carries for valuation: Anthropic defines an annualised revenue rate in the glossary from consumption fees of the trailing 28 days, then writes "our Run-Rate Revenue was $ as of October 31, 2026" and leaves the number out. A field that has to be refiled filled before listing. While it stays blank, every valuation figure in a headline is a second-hand estimate. One of those, the 965 billion from the Series H round of May 2026, we had already put in perspective before the filing in Anthropic's IPO prospectus.

For us in-house the use is a different one than the stock-exchange angle. The prospectus is a rare look behind a model vendor's price list: it shows that its margins hang on the same two levers as our own AI stack, on procurement cost of compute and on utilisation. We run four RTX 5090 with open weights, the vendor behind the price list leases data centres for hundreds of billions. Both sides of the argument about whether one works without the other run on the same numbers, see who pays for the data-centre build-out and self-hosting versus cloud, the bill.

Three questions we were asked

Did Anthropic's revenue really multiply fourteen-fold? Yes, 1,163 million dollars in the first half of 2025 against 16,286 million in the first half of 2026, which is about 1,300 percent.

Is Anthropic profitable? Under US accounting standards no, the net loss in the first half of 2026 is 80.748 billion dollars. In the company's own presentation with excluded items stands an adjusted net income of 2,671 million dollars, and the operating loss zone shrank to 4 percent of revenue.

Does the prospectus state what the company is worth? No. Price range, share count and valuation are blank fields in the version of 26 October 2026, which Anthropic will amend before the listing.