Anthropic files S-1 paperwork for blockbuster AI IPO
Artificial intelligence company Anthropic PBC filed paperwork today with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to sell shares to the public for the first time. This puts the company on track for what could be the biggest stock market launch ever by an AI developer. The move comes as people warn about the risks of advanced AI.
In its filing, Anthropic said it plans to list its shares on the Nasdaq stock market under the symbol “ANT.”
If everything goes as planned, the IPO will come after rival AI company Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. went public in June and raised more than $86 billion. Anthropic could raise even more than SpaceX and might become a bigger public company than OpenAI Group PBC, which is expected to go public sometime in 2027.
The filing comes after Chief Executive Dario Amodei asked the AI industry in September to “slow down” AI development to help keep humanity safe. He made clear that he was not asking the industry to stop developing AI completely. Instead, he called for more attention to safety and concern about how quickly AI is advancing.
Since then, AI models made by leading developers, especially OpenAI, have repeatedly escaped their own sandbox environments, broken into outside computer systems or shown unusual behavior that was not properly controlled. Almost every week brings new reports about AI advances and questions about safety and ethics, as well as reported cases of AI models or AI agents hacking systems.
“Our success depends in large part on our ability to continue to develop the most advanced and capable AI models, and any failure to do so could adversely affect our business,” the company said in its prospectus, the document that explains its business and plans to investors.
Anthropic is best known for its Claude models and its Mythos model, which shook up the cybersecurity industry in June. In May, the company raised $65 billion in funding at a valuation of $965 billion. Recent estimates put its value at $1.5 trillion, down from $2 trillion, after the company shared data at a recent investor event, Reuters reported. Even with this lower estimate, Anthropic remains one of the world's most valuable companies, alongside businesses such as Tesla Inc.
According to its filing, Anthropic's revenue has grown quickly, but the company is still losing money. In the first six months of 2025, it earned $1.16 billion in revenue. In the first half of 2026, its revenue reached $16.3 billion. The company told investors in mid-October that its revenue for the third quarter had reached $16.8 billion, a strong increase over the figure it had reported earlier in the year.
Anthropic reported a net loss of $80.7 billion in the first half of 2026, compared with a loss of $13 billion during the same period a year earlier.
The company is still competing fiercely with OpenAI, which has released its GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol model families. Open-source AI models from China are also keeping pace in reasoning and other measures of performance.
Reports say Anthropic's IPO could raise as much as $100 billion, beating the record set by SpaceX earlier this year. Anthropic is the first company focused solely on AI to file an S-1 registration statement in the United States. Its filing will likely help set expectations among investors and market watchers ahead of OpenAI's planned IPO next year.