Anthropic has spent the past year in court with publishers, at odds with the Pentagon, and in contracts for hundreds of billions of dollars in computing power. Today, it asked public investors to buy in anyway.
Anthropic has filed to go public for what could be one of the largest IPOs on record, opening its books for the first time.
The Claude maker told investors its revenue is now outpacing the cost of the computing power behind it. Revenue “grew 1,368% year-over-year for the three months ended June 30, 2026 compared to compute and infrastructure expenses that grew 300% during the same period,” per the filing.
Revenue reached $11.56 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up from $787 million a year earlier. Meanwhile, compute and infrastructure costs fell to 48% of revenue from 251% in the first quarter of 2025. The gap produced $974 million in operating income for the quarter, the only profitable quarter in the results the company disclosed.
Anthropic plans to list Class A shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker ANT, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading the offering. The other blockbuster stock offering of 2026, SpaceX, also listed shares on Nasdaq.
Anthropic’s seven co-founders will keep control after the IPO through a single Class F share, held by an LLC they own, that carries 50.1% of total voting power on most shareholder votes. The share has no economic rights.
The filing does not yet include a price range or share count. The Wall Street Journal reported that the offering could raise $100 billion or more and value Anthropic between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion, with a listing targeted for the week of Nov. 16.
If the offering goes through, Anthropic will become the first standalone American frontier AI lab to trade publicly, ahead of its rival OpenAI, which is not expected to list until 2027. The filing also is careful about how durable that revenue is, and spells out what that growth depends on: a small group of large customers and a steady stream of new models.
Here’s what else the filing reveals.
Reliant on a few big spenders
Anthropic’s top five customers accounted for about 25% of its revenue in the nine months ended Sept. 30, though no single customer made up more than 10%, according to the filing.
Anthropic counts paying customers and doesn’t report on active users. The number of customers spending at least $100,000 a year grew “from more than 950 to more than 11,900” over the 12-month period that ended Sept. 30.
About 250 customers spend at least $10 million, and the rest of the revenue comes from “approximately 40 million customers, each with less than $100,000 of revenue on a TTM basis.”
Anthropic also noted many of its largest clients don’t have long-term contracts, meaning future revenue from them could be volatile, drying up or even disappearing.
Anthropic estimated about 7% if its revue in the first nine months of 2026 came from customers it later found were violating its usage policy or commercial terms. The filing doesn’t specify the violation.
The company said it stepped up enforcement in August and September, which “may reduce our overall revenue and growth rates in future periods.”
Risk factors
Risk factors take up 94 pages of the filing—nearly a quarter of the document.
Anthropic wrote that models, “including our own, have exhibited, and may in the future exhibit, unexpected strategic or self-preserving behaviors, including attempts to resist shutdown.”
It also cited outputs that include “behavior resembling blackmails or efforts to influence human decision-makers to preserve the model’s continued operation or access.”
The company warned that insurance may not cover the fallout.
“With the scale of harm that could result from a catastrophic AI-related incident, no single insurer, and potentially the insurance industry in the aggregate, may have sufficient capacity or expertise to underwrite insurance commensurate with such exposure,” the company wrote.
Google and Amazon stand to benefit
Google and Amazon will collect the largest share of Anthropic’s compute spending. The filing shows Anthropic owes Google at least $114.5 billion through 2033 and Amazon at least $110 billion through 2036, and it must pay both “regardless of actual usage.”
Google’s take could grow further. Anthropic expects to spend another $125 billion to $150 billion on Google’s TPU capacity between 2028 and 2031.
The Journal puts Anthropic’s total compute obligations above $475 billion.
Both companies also hold Anthropic’s investors. Google put $10 billion and Amazon $5 billion into Anthropic’s Series H round. Anthropic can raise up to another $20 billion from Google and $15 billion from Amazon by issuing them convertible notes or non-voting stock, according to the filing.
Government and politics
In February, President Donald Trump directed federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s technology. The filing says the order came “in response to our publicly stated position that our technology should not be used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.” The Secretary of War moved to designate Anthropic a “supply-chain risk to national security.”
Anthropic sued the Department of War and other federal agencies, and won most of its case in a federal district court in August. In September, an appeals court ruled 2-1 against it on part of the designation. Anthropic has asked the full appeals court to reconsider.
Government contracts make up roughly 1% of its revenue, Anthropic said in its filing. The bigger risk is to sales to companies that serve the government.
Anthropic said it “cannot be certain that the resolution of these lawsuits will not adversely affect our ability to sell to government agencies,” and those customers.
ADWEEK has reached out to Anthropic for comment.
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