Anthropic filed its IPO application with the SEC

AI company Anthropic publicly filed its S-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for its IPO on October 26, 2026. The company has applied to list its shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market. The filing, accepted at 9:00 a.m. Eastern Time, consists of 87 documents.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 and commercially launched the Claude models in the first quarter of 2023. In the filing, the company describes Claude’s enterprise adoption as “the fastest enterprise adoption of a technology in history” and notes that revenue has gone from zero to this point. Its headquarters are on Market Street in San Francisco; the company is incorporated in Delaware and its status is that of a public benefit corporation.

IPO structure

The preliminary prospectus covers Class A common shares to be sold by Anthropic itself and by the existing shareholders named in the filing. Proceeds from sales by existing shareholders will not go to the company. The share count and estimated price range have been left blank; the filing says this information is missing and subject to change.

A broad banking syndicate, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, and Citigroup, is involved in the offering. The offering also covers Australia, Canada, certain countries in the European Economic Area, Japan, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, in addition to the United States. The shares can only be sold after the registration statement becomes effective.

Revenue and customer figures

The data in the filing shows the pace of growth. As of September 30, 2026, the number of customers generating $100,000 or more in annual revenue exceeded 11,900; the number of customers with more than $1 million was over 1,900, and the number with more than $10 million was over roughly 250. Net revenue retention was reported at about 900% on the same date.

In the three months ended June 30, 2026, revenue grew 1,368% year over year, while compute and infrastructure expenses rose 300%. Annualized revenue per employee was more than $6.6 million as of September 30, 2026; a year earlier, that figure was $1.4 million. As of June 30, 2026, the company had raised a total of $141.1 billion in capital and held $112.4 billion in cash and $19.3 billion in short-term investments.

Products and distribution channels

Claude is distributed through co-sell arrangements with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, as well as through system integrators such as Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG, and PwC, and via Salesforce and Snowflake. Claude Code launched with a research preview in February 2025, and Claude Cowork launched in January 2026; the company began merging the two products in September 2026. According to the filing, Claude Opus 5.5 reduced customer cost per task by about 40% compared with Opus 5.

Voting power stays with the founders

The filing shows that control of the company will largely remain with the founders. Immediately before the IPO closes, a Founder LLC whose members are the seven founders will be issued one Class F share; this share carries 50.1% of the total voting power in shareholder votes. The Long-Term Benefit Trust, established in 2023, has the authority to elect and remove a majority of the board through Class T shares. As a result, Anthropic is considered a “controlled company” under Nasdaq rules.

As of June 30, 2026, the company transferred 846,840,960 Class N shares, representing 5% of its fully diluted shares, to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund. The board approved authority to issue up to an additional 2% of shares when the share price exceeds the previous threshold by 50%. Each founder has pledged to dedicate 80% of their personal Anthropic shares to philanthropy.

Risks in the filing

The risk section lists topics such as dependence on advanced model development and sufficient compute, retaining founders and critical engineers, competition, misuse of models or failure of safety measures, dependence on cloud providers that are also investors and customers, and the concentration of voting power in a small number of hands. Anthropic had first announced its confidential draft filing on June 1, 2026.

It is not yet clear when or at what price the IPO will take place. The filing states that the offering is expected to begin as soon as practicable after the registration statement becomes effective.

Source: Unite.AI