Anthropic: The 5 Most Important Things Investors Need to Know from Its IPO Filing
Anthropic filed its first S-1 registration statement on Oct. 26. This document gives investors important information about one of the year's most eagerly awaited initial public offerings (IPOs). The company's stock will trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol ANT.
The filing did not say what the starting share price would be or how many shares would be sold. However, the IPO is expected to be as large as SpaceX's, with the company valued at between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion.
Here are five important things investors should know from Anthropic's filing before deciding whether to buy the stock when it becomes publicly available.
1. Revenue is growing very quickly
For a growth company like Anthropic, one of the most important things to watch is how quickly its revenue grows. This will be a major factor in deciding whether the stock performs well over the long term.
In the first half of 2026, Anthropic's revenue jumped 1,304% to $16.29 billion, up from $1.16 billion in the same period a year earlier. For all of 2025, revenue rose 1,089% to $4.59 billion. The company said its revenue grew 1,368% in the second quarter. This is extremely fast growth and helps explain why the company is expected to be valued so highly when its stock first trades.
Existing customers are also spending more money with the company. At the end of September, its net revenue retention rate was an impressive 900%. This means existing customers were generating much more revenue than before, showing how useful they find Anthropic's AI models.
However, investors were disappointed when Anthropic's management reportedly told investors earlier this month that revenue for the third quarter would be $16.8 billion. This suggested that growth had slowed significantly compared with the previous quarter. In the second quarter, revenue had jumped to $11.6 billion from $4.7 billion in the first quarter.
2. Its customers come from many different sources
One of the most surprising details in Anthropic's prospectus is how many different customers its business serves. You might expect such a young company to depend heavily on a small number of large customers, but Anthropic does not appear to have that problem.
The AI company said that no single customer accounted for more than 10% of its revenue during the first nine months of the year. Its five biggest customers together accounted for about 25% of revenue.
At the same time, 48% of its revenue came from cloud computing providers that offer its AI models.
3. Its growing losses are not as bad as they look
During the first half of the year, Anthropic reported a huge loss of $80.7 billion. That was much larger than the $12.9 billion loss it reported for the same period in 2025. However, this figure does not tell the whole story.
Most of these losses were accounting losses on paper. They happened because the value of Anthropic's convertible notes changed. As the AI company's value increased through new funding rounds, the value of these notes also rose. The company lists the notes as debts on its balance sheet. This led to about $72 billion in losses that did not involve an actual cash payment. If these charges are left out, the company's loss would have been about $8.7 billion.
When Anthropic goes public, these convertible notes will turn into shares of stock, removing this debt from its balance sheet.
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4. It has huge spending commitments ahead
Anthropic's prospectus also shows that the company has agreed to spend enormous amounts of money with several companies to get the computing power it needs.
It has agreed to pay Alphabet $114.5 billion for computing power between April 2026 and July 2033. It has also committed to buying tensor processing units (TPUs), which are specialized chips, worth between $125 billion and $150 billion, with delivery scheduled between 2028 and 2031. In addition, it has agreed to spend at least $110 billion with Amazon and $44.9 billion with Microsoft. These spending commitments apply whether or not the company uses all the computing power it has agreed to buy.
Anthropic has also agreed to spend $120.5 billion with SpaceX through 2029. After the agreements' non-cancellable periods end in January and March 2027, either side can cancel the deal by giving 90 days' written notice. The company also listed a $44.6 billion agreement with NScale for computing power using Nvidia GPUs, as well as a $41.3 billion agreement with Lambda.
5. Improving efficiency is important
Anthropic is spending heavily to get more computing power, but it is also starting to show signs that its business is becoming more efficient. In the second quarter, its revenue rose 1,368% compared with the same quarter a year earlier, while its spending on computing and infrastructure grew by a much smaller 300%. This helped the company report an adjusted operating profit for the quarter.
For a business like Anthropic that aims to grow to a very large size, improving its profit margins on AI inference will be important to becoming consistently profitable over the long term. So far, the company is showing encouraging early signs that it can do this.