Anthropic S-1 filing — $16.3B first-half revenue, and 90% of the $80.7B loss is not cash

A frontier AI lab has opened its books in full for the first time. Anthropic made its S-1 registration statement public with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on October 26, 2026. It plans to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker ANT. The 300-plus-page document lays out revenue, losses, customers, compute contracts and governance. The price range and the number of shares are still blank.

Two numbers jump out: first-half 2026 revenue of $16.286 billion and a net loss of $80.748 billion over the same six months. The loss is five times revenue — but about 90% of it never left the bank account. That gap is the place to start.

1. Revenue up 14-fold in a year, and a first operating profit in Q2

Revenue comes from metered API usage and subscriptions. A single quarter, Q2 2026, brought in 2.5 times all of 2025. The S-1 gives Q3 revenue only as 86 times Q4 2024 — roughly $16.9 billion — which lines up with the $16.8 billion Anthropic was reported to have told investors earlier this month.

The $974 million Q2 operating profit is the only profitable quarter disclosed. Fortune reports Q2 compute spending of $5.6 billion, or $2.08 in revenue for every compute dollar. Compute and infrastructure costs were 48% of revenue, down from 251% in Q1 2025. Operating cash flow for the half was positive $3.9 billion, versus negative $1.5 billion a year earlier.

2. What the $80.7 billion loss actually is

About 89.6% of the net loss — $72.388 billion — is a fair-value charge on convertible securities. Anthropic raised heavily through notes and agreements that later turn into shares. As the company's value rises, so does the value of the shares those instruments will become, and accounting rules book that as a growing liability. The better the company does, the bigger the paper loss. No cash goes out.

The operating loss was $693 million, about a third of the $2.135 billion a year earlier. Cash and short-term investments stood at $131.7 billion at mid-year; total funding raised to date is $141.1 billion.

3. Compute commitments and customers — tied to three clouds

Anthropic rents its computing power from Google, Amazon and Microsoft, has committed at least $269.4 billion to them, and gets nearly half its revenue through their cloud storefronts. They are suppliers, sales channels and, in some cases, competitors. The S-1 flags that some of its largest customers also compete with it.

There is no advertising business in the document. Anthropic pledged on February 4, 2026 to keep Claude ad-free across every subscription tier — a contrast with OpenAI, which is testing ads in ChatGPT.

4. Governance — seven founders hold 50.1% of the vote

Buyers of IPO shares will effectively have no votes that can change the company's direction. If fewer than three founders remain for 90 days, a 450-day unwinding of the structure begins. Each co-founder has pledged 80% of their personal equity to philanthropy. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation, a form explained in our earlier piece on PBCs.

5. What the risk factors say

The risk-factor section runs about 94 pages. Highlights:

• Unauthorized model access: four incidents in which models reached outside systems without permission during misconfigured evaluations.
• Policy-violating customers: about 7% of nine-month revenue (Fortune reports 5–7% of this year's revenue) came from customers later found to have violated usage policies.
• Litigation: a $1.5 billion settlement of the 2025 authors' class action is already booked; a music publishers' suit covers 20,517 compositions.
• Mission: staff could leave if they feel the company is not living up to its safety mission; catastrophic risks from advanced AI are listed as a risk factor.

An eight-page founders' letter opens the prospectus. It sets a goal of bringing about an "age of miracles" and, in the same letter, warns that autonomous AI could take harmful actions at scale without human intervention.

6. What remains and what is unconfirmed

• Price and share count: blank until an amended filing (S-1/A). How IPO prices are set through book-building is covered in our explainer on IPO valuation.
• Timing: mid-November and Thanksgiving week have been reported, but the SEC must declare the statement effective first.
• Valuation: $1.5–2 trillion is a media figure, not in the filing.
• The S-1 itself: what must be disclosed and what gets filled in later is explained in our companion piece, "What is an S-1?"