Anthropic dropped its S-1 on Monday. Nasdaq listing, ticker ANT, Goldman Sachs lead-left, 22 underwriters in total, and the first frontier AI lab to make a real run at the public market. The numbers inside are the wildest I’ve read all year, and I read these for fun.
Revenue for the first half of 2026 came in at $16.29 billion, up 1,304% from $1.16 billion a year earlier. All of 2025 was $4.59 billion, itself up 1,089% from the year before. A growth curve this steep looks like a typo until you remember who’s buying: 11,900 companies now spend $100,000 or more with Anthropic on a trailing-year basis, and roughly 250 of them spend $10 million or more.
The loss everyone will screenshot
Headline net loss for the half: $80.7 billion. Read the footnote before you post it. About $72 billion of that is accounting charges from convertible notes revaluing as the company’s valuation climbed, so most of the paper loss is a byproduct of getting more expensive. Real debt at the end of June was $6.2 billion. The cash losses are still enormous, $41.9 billion for 2025 after $8.3 billion in 2024, but the scary number and the real number are different numbers.
Then there’s net revenue retention: roughly 900% as of September 30. Existing customers spend nine times more with Anthropic year over year. The median public cloud software company sits near 108%, per Altimeter’s Jamin Ball. I read that three times. It’s in the prospectus.
Where the money goes
Gross margin hit 85%, up from an implied 12% a year ago, and “substantially all” of cost of revenue is compute. The scale of that spend is the part nobody knows how to price. SpaceX’s Q3 filing shows Anthropic paid it just over $5 billion in one quarter, and Anthropic has committed to as much as $1.25 billion a month on Colossus capacity outside Memphis. One lab, one vendor, $5 billion in three months.
The channel is expensive too. Sales and marketing jumped 2,540% to $3.17 billion, with $2.7 billion of that going to channel partners. AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure carried 48% of revenue, and consumption contracts make up 80% of the total. That’s utility-style revenue attached to frontier-lab costs.
The timing is the gamble
Reuters reports the listing could land before Thanksgiving, and the window is rougher than the filing. CoreWeave and Nebius are both down more than 30% this month on data center credit fears. Solidigm pulled its IPO last week. SpaceX, the biggest IPO on record at $85.7 billion raised, is trading below its June opening price. Anthropic is walking into that.
The risk factors have their own edge. The prospectus warns the standoff with the Trump administration and the Pentagon could cause “material revenue losses or business disruptions.” And six weeks before filing, Dario Amodei published an essay asking labs to slow frontier development. The man urging everyone to pace the frontier sprinted to the Nasdaq. Both positions can be sincere. They’re still funny side by side.
What I’ll watch
Analysts on CNBC were already floating a $1.5 to $2 trillion valuation, which works out to roughly 22 to 30 times current revenue. The last private round in May valued Anthropic at $965 billion, past OpenAI’s $852 billion. Public markets have never priced anything like this: a company growing four digits a year that hands a single infrastructure vendor $5 billion a quarter.
Claude is my default model and I still wouldn’t buy this at 30 times sales. The product can be that good and the price that rich; the S-1 quietly makes both cases. When ANT starts trading, it grades more than Anthropic: the compute buildout, the neocloud debt behind it, and the whole bet that this spending turns into revenue. I’ll watch the first week of trading closer than any benchmark drop this year.