Anthropic Files for IPO: What's Next

Anthropic filed its S-1 with the SEC on Monday, October twenty-sixth. It's going public on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, and it could start trading as soon as the week of November sixteenth.

So this is the real thing now, not the leak we talked about before.

The real thing. Three hundred and thirty-five pages, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading it. And the two numbers everyone wants are still blank: how many shares, and at what price.

They filed without a price? That seems like the whole point of the document.

It's normal. Under SEC rules the price range comes later, when they start the roadshow and pitch big investors. The Journal says that can't begin until fifteen calendar days after the filing, so November tenth at the earliest.

Okay, but people are throwing around valuation numbers anyway. What are they actually based on?

Reports. Reuters says some current and prospective investors are putting it around one and a half trillion dollars, down from the roughly two trillion people expected earlier. AP says the final valuation and offering price have not been established.

Down from two trillion. That's a casual five hundred billion dollar haircut.

In private, back in May, they raised at nine hundred and sixty-five billion. So even the lower number is a big step up in five months.

What's actually in the filing, though? What did we learn that we didn't know?

The business is growing at a rate that honestly looks like a typo. Revenue was sixteen point three billion dollars in the first half of this year. Same period last year: one point two billion.

That's... thirteen times.

Roughly fourteen times, driven largely by Claude Code, the coding tool. And the company says plainly in the filing that it does not expect to keep growing at comparable rates.

Fine, but are they making money? Because nobody in this business seems to be.

No. Net loss of about eighty billion dollars in the first six months of twenty twenty-six. Same period last year, about thirteen billion.

Sorry. They lost eighty billion while making sixteen? How does anyone look at that and want to buy the stock?

Because of one number in there. Net revenue retention, as of September thirtieth, was around nine hundred percent.

Meaning what, in English?

Existing customers spent about nine times more this year than last. A company starts with one use case and spreads Claude across departments. For the median public cloud software company in January, that figure was a hundred and eight percent.

So a hundred and eight versus nine hundred. That's not even the same sport.

And the money they raise goes straight back out. They want to raise more than a hundred billion dollars, for data centers, talent and training models. Reuters has reported the same hundred billion target.

Is there a hint anywhere about what one share is actually worth right now?

There is, and it's a lovely bit of detective work. Protos spotted a footnote. Anthropic booked a two billion dollar expense last quarter for matching employee charity donations, and settled it in October with about twenty-eight million non-voting shares.

Divide one by the other.

Seventy-one dollars and forty-three cents a share, as of September thirtieth. That implies about one point two trillion. But that includes a discount because the shares weren't publicly traded yet.

And in the private markets now?

Nasdaq Private Market indicated eighty-five dollars and ten cents on October ninth. Live estimates are near ninety dollars eighty. Both of those land close to that one and a half trillion number.

What's the case against? Because the market's been jumpy lately.

Very jumpy. Neoclouds like CoreWeave and Nebius have lost over thirty percent of their value in October, with credit risk rising across data centers. And there are more than ninety pages of risk factors in the filing.

Ninety pages. Anything that stands out?

They flag the risk of material revenue losses from Trump administration actions. CNBC notes two high-profile disputes with the U.S. government in recent months over safety, regulation and national security. And they name OpenAI and Google as the competition.

Their own investors are partly their competitors, right? Amazon and Google?

Amazon is still one of the biggest backers, and Alphabet is set to be a bigger shareholder. There's also a governance wrinkle: it's a public benefit corporation with a Long-Term Benefit Trust, and a Founder LLC that holds voting power.

So public shareholders don't get normal control.

Not in the usual way. The stated public purpose in the charter is the responsible development of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity. You're buying into that structure.

Alright. What do I actually watch for over the next three weeks?

November tenth, roadshow can start, and that's when the price range and share count appear. The earliest possible pricing is Friday the thirteenth, earliest trading Monday the sixteenth. SpaceX went from filing to first trade in twenty-three days.

And SpaceX is the comparison everyone's making?

It raised eighty-five point seven billion in June, the biggest IPO on record, at around one point eight trillion. Its shares finished last week slightly below where they opened.

Which is not the most thrilling omen.

No. And there's a Renaissance Capital strategist, Matt Kennedy, saying a successful Anthropic IPO could crack open or slam shut the IPO market well into twenty twenty-seven.

No pressure on the bankers, then.

The calendar's tight too. Midterms on November third, Thanksgiving on the twenty-sixth. On SpaceX's timetable they'd have about a week to spare.

So if the price range shows up around the tenth, that's the first real signal.

That's the one to wait for. Everything before it is people guessing off a footnote.