Anthropic filed its S-1 with the SEC on October 26. Here are the figures from the filing that matter for people who actually use Claude.
The business is growing faster than anything I’ve seen in enterprise software. It ran a $693 million operating loss for the first half, and it turned an operating profit in the June quarter. About 90% of the $80.7 billion reported “net loss” is a non-cash accounting charge. The part that deserves scrutiny is the share structure: public investors will get economic exposure and almost zero governance control.
Here’s what the filing shows.
Revenue: the headline figures
Three years of top-line growth, from the S-1’s consolidated income statement:
| Year | Revenue |
|---|---|
| 2023 | $41 million |
| 2024 | $386 million |
| 2025 | $4.585 billion |
| H1 2026 | $16.286 billion |
The H1 2025 figure was $1.163 billion. The first half of 2026 produced 14 times the revenue of the same period a year earlier. On a base above $1 billion, 1,300% year-over-year growth is unusual enough that it warrants reading twice. The figures are from the S-1’s consolidated statements of operations.
The quarterly detail is sharper. For the three months ended June 30, 2026, revenue grew 1,368% year-over-year. Compute and infrastructure expenses grew 300% in the same quarter. The gap between revenue growth and cost growth is what early-innings software margin expansion looks like.
The $80.7 billion “loss” explained
Anthropic reported an $80.748 billion net loss for the first half of 2026. That number is on the S-1’s consolidated statement of operations.
The detail that matters: $72.4 billion of that figure is a non-cash change in the fair value of convertible notes, derivative liabilities, and SAFEs. The S-1 says those changes were driven primarily by its outstanding convertible promissory notes, which rose in value as Anthropic’s enterprise valuation increased. That creates a reported “loss” with no cash leaving the company.
The operating loss was $693 million for H1 2026. Compare that to a $2.135 billion operating loss in H1 2025. On $16.3 billion in revenue, a $693 million operating loss is a 4.3% operating loss margin. For a company at this scale and growth rate, that’s a fundamentally different conversation than the headline number suggests.
The half-year figure also hides the turn. For the three months ended June 30, 2026, the S-1 reports operating income of $1.0 billion and an 8% operating margin, compared with a $1.2 billion operating loss in the same quarter of 2025.
Enterprise traction
The S-1 tracks large customers by trailing-twelve-month (TTM) revenue:
- Customers at $100K+ TTM: grew from more than 950 (September 2025) to more than 11,900 (September 2026)
- Customers at $1M+ TTM: more than 1,900
- Customers at $10M+ TTM: approximately 250
- Fortune 10: all 10 companies are $100K+ customers
- Fortune 500: over 50% are $100K+ customers
Net Revenue Retention as of September 30, 2026 was approximately 900%. By the S-1’s definition, customers who were paying a year earlier (excluding Claude Pro and Max subscribers) brought in about nine times as much revenue in the latest quarter. Whether that holds as the base matures is the key bull-case question. It’s an extraordinary number to put in a prospectus.
The Claude Code signal is worth noting separately. In Q3 2026, Claude Enterprise users who did not use Claude Code spent less than $75 a month on average. The top 5% of Claude Enterprise users who used Claude Code spent approximately 20 times that amount.
My read: agentic use compounds, and this is what it looks like on an invoice.
What it means if you use Claude
The filing confirms the pricing trajectory that anyone building on Claude’s API has already noticed. Claude Opus 5.5, launched in September 2026, cut customers’ cost per task by approximately 40% compared to Opus 5. Claude Fable 5.1, also launched in September, reduced typical workload costs by about 25%, with savings up to 45% for complex coding and highly agentic tasks.
Two September releases, two cost cuts. I expect that pattern to continue.
One data point from the filing on the code side: over 90% of contributions to Anthropic’s own codebase in September 2026 were written by Claude. The average daily code volume per engineer in Q3 2026 was more than 45 times the average in 2024. The company is running Claude at scale on its own code.
Our earlier piece on Claude Opus 5.5’s pricing changes covered the cost breakdown at launch. The S-1 confirms those trends are ongoing.
People and voices: what observers are saying
On the bull side, Gavin Baker, managing partner at Atreides Management, posted on X: “I am shocked, absolutely shocked, that Anthropic ARR has likely gone vertical in October after they cut token prices.” Baker said he believed Anthropic could reach a $100 billion annualized revenue rate by year-end. The post was sarcastic: he added that “the exact same thing happened for the entire AI market, which is why GPU rental prices have surged while token prices declined.” (Yahoo Finance / StockTwits, October 26, 2026)
Daniel McCarthy, a marketing professor at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, posted a direct LinkedIn assessment: “So in sum, explosive growth. Lots of customers. Great funnel. Mostly B2B. Lots of revenue expansion in B2B.” He described the filing as “a strong +ive datapoint” and wrote that Anthropic was “GAAP profitable on an operating basis in Q2,” with an 8.4% GAAP operating margin. (Same source)
Ben Bajarin, CEO of Creative Strategies, flagged the expansion opportunity: “ten largest Fortune 500 customers spend more than eight times the cohort average, yet still allocate less than 1% of their expenses to Anthropic.” His point was that those customers have room to spend more on Anthropic. (Same source)
Michael Burry offered a dissenting take on his Substack. His summary: “there is a lot here but nothing that changes my view.” Burry flagged what he described as “overall slowing of growth” and argued that models are “already being used more efficiently and that trend will continue, to the detriment of their growth rate.” He also noted that the S-1 largely provides information through June 30, and that “a lot changed in the developer landscape” over roughly four months. (Benzinga / Yahoo Finance, October 27, 2026)
On the big backers: PitchBook analyst Harrison Rolfes told TechCrunch he estimates Google’s current stake at “closer to 8%,” down from about 14% in early 2025 according to court filings reported by The New York Times. Amazon’s position is more complex. Its total investment is about $18 billion, including $8 billion in convertible notes. Amazon’s own filings valued those notes at $97.9 billion as of June 30, on $6.2 billion in principal outstanding. Anthropic, in turn, has committed to spend at least $110 billion on AWS over the next ten years. (TechCrunch, October 27, 2026)
The governance structure
This is the section worth reading carefully before you form a view on the stock.
Anthropic is going public with a share structure that separates economic rights from control. Class A shares, the ones the public will buy, carry one vote per share. Two other classes do most of the governance work.
Class F (founders’ golden share): A single share, held by a Founder LLC whose initial sole members are the seven co-founders: Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish, and Christopher Olah. The LLC generally votes as a majority of its members decide. This share carries a fixed 50.1% of total voting power on matters submitted to stockholders generally, including the election of the directors other than the Class T directors. The S-1 says this voting power is not derived from or proportionate to economic interest. There is no fixed end date: the share stays outstanding until fewer than three Continuing Founders have remained for 90 consecutive days, which starts a 450-day transition period, after which the Class F stock is redeemed.
Class T (Long-Term Benefit Trust): Held by the LTBT, which has five authorized trustee seats, one currently vacant. The four trustees are Neil “Buddy” Shah (the chair), Richard Fontaine, Ben Bernanke (former Federal Reserve chairman), and Christopher Stubbs (Harvard physics and astronomy professor). The LTBT can elect and remove the majority of Anthropic’s board through Class T directors. Class T stock has no economic rights.
The practical result: public shareholders hold no decisive say over board composition, strategy, or most governance outcomes. The S-1 says Anthropic is a “controlled company” under Nasdaq rules because the LTBT, as sole holder of Class T stock, generally has the power to elect a majority of the board.
Anthropic’s stated public benefit purpose is “the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity,” and the S-1 says the LTBT exists to help ensure the company is managed in a way that responsibly balances its goals as a public benefit corporation. The trust’s power runs through the board: it can elect and remove a majority of the directors.
One item that will likely draw attention: the Bartz copyright settlement appears as a 2025 operating expense. The class action lawsuit, Bartz, et al. v. Anthropic PBC, settled for $1.5 billion, approved by the district court in July 2026. The S-1 also lists publisher suits, including music publishers’ Concord Music Group cases over song lyrics and an October 2026 claim from a group of Canadian news publishers.
The financial picture
Anthropic has raised $141.1 billion in aggregate capital. As of June 30, 2026, it held $112.4 billion in cash and cash equivalents and $19.3 billion in short-term investments, for a combined $131.7 billion. Total assets were $147.4 billion.
The accumulated deficit was $132.9 billion, of which $113.2 billion came from fair value changes on convertible notes and derivative liabilities since 2023.
The compute commitments run the other way. Anthropic has committed at least $114 billion in cloud spend to Google through 2033 and at least $110 billion to AWS over ten years. Google and Amazon, both investors, are also its cloud suppliers.
The Wall Street Journal has reported a debut the week of November 16 at a $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion valuation. Anthropic says the share count and price range have not yet been determined, and those figures appear as blanks in the current filing.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the offering.
What this means for Claude users
I see nothing in the IPO details that changes what Claude costs you to run today.
The governance structure means the mission framing is legally embedded, not just marketing. The Long-Term Benefit Trust exists to help ensure the company is managed in a way that responsibly balances its goals as a public benefit corporation, and it elects a majority of the board. Whether that’s reassuring or concerning probably depends on your view of the trustees.
What the S-1 does confirm: $100K+ customers grew from more than 950 to more than 11,900 in a year, costs fell with both September model releases, and over 90% of contributions to Anthropic’s own codebase in September 2026 were written by Claude. About 250 customers paid $10 million or more over the trailing twelve months.
If you’ve put Claude in production, the filing is evidence that commitment is shared by some of the largest companies on earth.
Image: Anthropic