Anthropic IPO: date, valuation, banks and what the S-1 shows

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, filed for an initial public offering on 26 October 2026. The registration statement (form S-1) is now public on the SEC’s EDGAR database, and it says Anthropic wants to list Class A shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker ANT. What it doesn’t say yet is the price. The price range and the number of shares are still blank, and they will only appear in an amended filing. We read the S-1 itself and checked the reported dates, deal size and valuation against the outlets that first published them. Everything below was checked on 30 October 2026, and we will update the page as the deal moves.

Has Anthropic filed for an IPO?

Yes. The S-1 cover page reads “As filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on October 26, 2026”, and Anthropic announced the filing on its newsroom the same day. The company’s own wording is careful: the registration statement “has been filed with the SEC but has not yet become effective”, and the number of shares and the price range “have not yet been determined”. Until the SEC declares the registration effective and the deal is priced, nobody can buy shares in the offering.

The public S-1 didn’t come out of nowhere. EDGAR shows Anthropic first submitted a confidential draft (form DRS) on 1 June 2026 and amended it five times between 13 July and 9 October. That confidential route is normal for large listings. SEC rules require the filing to be public at least 15 days before the roadshow starts, which is why the public S-1 is the real starting signal.

The document is long. Reports quoting the Irish Times put it at about 240,000 words, and our own count of the main S-1 document, including tables, came to roughly 243,000. The legal name on the cover is Anthropic, PBC, because Anthropic is a public benefit corporation. If you mostly know the company through its models, our guide to Claude Sonnet vs Opus explains the current line-up.

When is the Anthropic IPO date?

There is no confirmed date. Anthropic hasn’t announced one, and the S-1 doesn’t contain one. The most detailed timetable comes from IFR, the capital-markets trade publication, which reported that the public roadshow and bookbuilding should start in the week of 9 November, with the shares “set to debut on November 20”. Reports citing the Wall Street Journal pointed to the week of 16 November. Bloomberg reported earlier in October that Anthropic aimed to complete the listing before the US Thanksgiving holiday on 26 November.

How big is the deal, and what is Anthropic worth?

The size isn’t in the filing either. IFR reported that the offering “is likely to be US$75bn–$100bn”, made up of new shares the company sells (primary) and existing shares that current holders sell (secondary). Reports citing the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times put the raise at $100 billion or more. For scale, IFR compares it with the $86.25 billion SpaceX raised in its June 2026 listing, so a deal at the top of that range would be the largest IPO on record.

The last valuation that has actually been set is from the private market. Anthropic’s Series H, which the S-1 shows raised $65.2 billion in two closings in May and June 2026 at $589.0095 a share, valued the company at $965 billion after the money came in, according to Reuters, Bloomberg and Anthropic’s lawyers at Orrick. The IPO valuation is still open, and the numbers in the press have come down:

• In August, backers were “pricing in USD 2tn”, Enterprise AM reported.
• In mid-October, Reuters reported that investor talk had settled around $1.5 trillion, down from about $2 trillion.
• On filing day, Yahoo Finance’s live coverage reported a range of $1.5–2 trillion under discussion.
• IFR wrote that the “US$2trn valuation target mooted only a couple of weeks ago may prove challenging”.

The real number will come from the price range in the amended S-1 and then from the final price set after the roadshow, when the banks have seen how much investors will pay.

Which banks are running the IPO?

The S-1 cover lists 22 underwriters. Goldman Sachs is named first, the “lead left” position that usually goes to the bank running the books, and Morgan Stanley second. The filing names Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC as the stabilisation agent, the bank allowed to support the share price in the first days of trading. IFR describes the two as “joint lead bookrunners on a 22-bank underwriting syndicate”. J.P. Morgan and Citigroup come next on the cover, followed by 18 more banks, from Barclays and Wells Fargo to Macquarie Capital.

What the S-1 shows about revenue and losses

This is the first time Anthropic has published audited numbers, and the growth is the headline. All figures below are from the S-1 unless we say otherwise.

The second quarter of 2026 was also Anthropic’s first quarter with an operating profit, $974 million, after five quarters of operating losses in the quarterly table the S-1 shows. Bloomberg reported on 14 October that Anthropic had told investors third-quarter revenue reached $16.8 billion and that it was profitable on an adjusted basis. That Q3 figure isn’t in the S-1 and isn’t audited, so don’t mix it up with the first-half numbers.

The loss looks alarming at first: $80.7 billion for the first six months of 2026. Most of it isn’t money that left the company. Anthropic raised a lot of money through convertible notes, derivatives and SAFEs, instruments that turn into shares later. Accounting rules make the company carry them at fair value, and as Anthropic’s own valuation climbed, those instruments became worth more on paper. That increase is booked as a loss. It came to $72.4 billion in the first half. Most of what remains is compute: the S-1’s cost lines for compute and infrastructure add up to about $8.9 billion for the period.

What we found in the S-1 that the headlines skipped

Most coverage stopped at revenue, losses and the valuation. We went further into the filing, to the revenue notes in the financial statements and the metrics section, and worked out a few numbers ourselves. The calculations are simple arithmetic on figures in the S-1, and we show how we did each one.

Anthropic is mainly a pay-per-use business, not a subscription app. The S-1 splits revenue into consumption-based fees, where customers pay per token for the model they pick, and subscriptions such as Claude Pro and Max. In the first half of 2026, consumption brought in $13.1 billion, or 80%, and subscriptions $3.2 billion, or 20%. In 2025 the split was 83% to 17%. So the monthly plans most people know are the smaller part of the business. The growth comes mostly from companies and developers building on Claude, and the S-1 itself warns that this revenue could fall if customers “shift usage to lower-priced models”. For anyone who uses Claude through the API, that is the competition that keeps prices like those in our Sonnet vs Opus table under pressure.

About nine-tenths of the half-year loss is the accounting charge. $72.4 billion of the $80.7 billion net loss is the change in fair value of convertible notes, derivatives and SAFEs, which works out at 90%. Customers are also paying more up front. Deferred revenue, money billed or received before the service is delivered, rose from $269 million at the end of 2025 to $1.65 billion at the end of June 2026. On top of that, the S-1 shows $10.8 billion of contracted revenue still to be recognised.

The valuation in revenue terms. If you multiply the latest quarters by four, Q2 2026 revenue of $11.6 billion gives about $46 billion a year, and the reported $16.8 billion for Q3 gives about $67 billion. At $1.5 trillion, Anthropic would be valued at roughly 22 times that Q3 figure. At $2 trillion it would be about 30 times. Measured against the audited Q2 figure, the multiples are about 32 and 43. This is a back-of-envelope check, not a valuation. It shows how much growth buyers are being asked to pay for in advance.

Who controls Anthropic after the IPO?

Not the people buying the listed shares. The S-1 sets up five classes of stock, and only one of them trades:

The Long-Term Benefit Trust is the body Anthropic set up to keep its stated mission ahead of short-term profit, and the IPO keeps it in charge of the board. Combined with the founders’ voting majority, that means a Class A shareholder gets a share of the economics and very little say over how the company is run.

Insiders can’t sell everything on day one. The S-1 locks up the co-founders and holders of more than 0.5% for 365 days, or until Anthropic reports its third-quarter 2027 results if that comes first. Other directors, officers and employees get staggered releases: up to 10% of their shares from the first day of trading, with further releases on days 27, 48, 62 and 76.

The main risks in the prospectus

The risk-factor section runs for dozens of pages. These are the points that stood out to us, with the source for each.

If you want to see how Anthropic’s products stack up against OpenAI’s and Google’s today, we compare them in Claude vs ChatGPT vs Gemini, and against OpenAI alone in Claude vs ChatGPT.

Confirmed vs reported

Can you buy Anthropic shares?

Not yet. Until the registration is effective and the offering is priced, there are no listed shares to buy. IPO allocations go mainly to the institutional investors the banks meet on the roadshow. Once ANT starts trading on Nasdaq, it can be bought like any other US-listed stock through a broker that offers US shares. First-day prices of big listings can swing a long way from the IPO price in either direction.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and method