1 Great Number From Anthropic's IPO Prospectus and 1 Number That Disappointed

After a long wait, Anthropic has finally released the document that explains its plans to sell shares to the public for the first time. The company is preparing for a huge initial public offering (IPO) that could raise $100 billion and give it a value of up to $2 trillion.

Some important numbers from the document had already been reported before its release. The official S-1 filing confirmed those reports and provided more than 400 pages of details about how Anthropic runs its business.

Here is one impressive number and one disappointing number from Anthropic's IPO prospectus.

The good Anthropic number: 79%

One of the best numbers in the report is 79%. This is the share of Anthropic's revenue in the third quarter, which ended on Sept. 30, that came from customers outside its five biggest customers.

This shows that Anthropic gets money from many different customers instead of depending on just a few. The company also said that no single customer provided more than 10% of its revenue during the nine months ending Sept. 30.

Many large companies that provide cloud computing services have seen their revenue grow quickly because of artificial intelligence (AI). But some of that growth has come from just two or three customers. Investors usually do not like to see a company depend so heavily on so few customers.

Anthropic has gained more customers who use its Claude family of large language models (LLMs). At the end of 2023, just two customers provided 54% of the company's total revenue.

Anthropic also reported that, by the end of September, more than 11,900 customers had spent over $100,000 with the company during the previous 12 months.

During the first half of 2026, customers who had spent at least $100,000 over the previous 12 months provided 74% of the company's total revenue. This shows how important large business customers are to Anthropic's growth.

The bad Anthropic number: 47%

Anthropic did not directly state how much money it made in the third quarter. However, it provided enough information to work out an estimate.

In its prospectus, Anthropic said that its revenue for the three months ending Sept. 30 of this year was 86 times its revenue for the three months ending Dec. 31, 2024. Revenue during that earlier period was $197 million. Based on these figures, Anthropic made about $16.9 billion in revenue in the third quarter.

This means revenue grew by almost 47% compared with the second quarter of 2026. Almost any other company reporting this kind of quarterly growth would probably see its stock price and company value rise sharply.

But the AI industry is different. Companies are trying to enter the stock market with possible values of several trillion dollars. Anthropic's 47% growth was much slower than its growth in the second quarter, when revenue increased by 144% compared with the first quarter.

Several news organizations had correctly reported Anthropic's third-quarter revenue before the prospectus was released. After those reports, some Wall Street analysts said the company's growth might not be fast enough to support the high value it wants to reach.

"The market has moved from simply rewarding growth to asking much tougher questions about funding, cost of capital and returns on that spending," said Charu Chanana, chief investment strategist at Saxo Markets, in a research note earlier this month.

She also said: "For Anthropic's IPO, these numbers strengthen the growth story, but valuation will still be the big debate ... A valuation above $2 trillion would be roughly 30 times annualized Q3 revenue, while investors will also have to digest the enormous infrastructure commitments required to sustain that growth."

There was some better news for the wider AI industry. Gil Luria of D.A. Davidson said in a research note that Anthropic's slower revenue growth was not caused by weaker demand for AI. Instead, he said the company was facing more competition from advanced AI models like those made by OpenAI, as well as open-weight models that developers can access and use more freely.

In the end, I think Anthropic will raise between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion through its IPO. Investors still do not want to miss out on the chance to make money from the AI boom.

However, things could become much harder after the company goes public. It could face challenges similar to those experienced by Space Exploration Technologies since it entered the public stock market in June.