OpenAI rival Anthropic makes its IPO filing public as the race to dominate Wall Street’s AI trade heats up

Anthropic is making its pitch to Wall Street, and investors now have actual numbers to argue about.

The company behind Claude has made its IPO filing public, setting up a possible Nasdaq debut under the ticker ANT. It sent the paperwork privately to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, giving regulators time to review it before the rest of the market got a look.

Anthropic opens its books as Claude brings in billions

Dario Amodei started Anthropic in 2021 with a group of researchers who left OpenAI, now one of its biggest competitors. Dario runs the company as CEO, while fellow co-founder Daniela Amodei is president and board chair.

Businesses have been spending heavily on Claude, hoping it can help employees write software, get through routine tasks faster and build services they couldn’t easily offer before. Claude Code has been a major driver of growth in 2026, helped by new models including Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5.

But selling powerful AI is hardly a quiet business. Anthropic is fighting Google and OpenAI for customers, while its views on safety, government rules and national security have drawn criticism. Those disagreements have also led to two high-profile clashes with the US government in recent months.

One can see the reason for investors’ concern from the financial numbers. Anthropic had revenues of $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026 compared to $1.2 billion during the same period in the previous year. Operating losses were reduced to $693 million, which was $2.1 billion lower than the year before.

There is one more number for earnings, but it requires certain clarification. Adjusted operating income stood at $1.6 billion. It is a non-GAAP metric and it means that there were certain adjustments made on top of the usual result. Under those regular rules, the company was reporting operating losses.

These margins cannot be considered stable, however. Costs may suddenly go up when buying access to additional computing resources until their full utilization. There is quite a lot of infrastructure expenses associated with the development of AI.

Most customers pay based on how much AI they consume. That business brought in $13.1 billion, or 80% of first-half revenue. Subscription plans delivered another $3.2 billion, making up the other 20%. Usage prices vary with the model chosen and the number of tokens, the units used to measure what the AI processes.

Anthropic operates direct sales channels but also has access to buyers through Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. These cloud platforms accounted for 48% of Anthropic’s revenue in the first six months. The platforms invoice the customers, receive payments from them, and then remit Anthropic its part minus their fees.

In addition, Anthropic had $10.8 billion of remaining performance obligations as of June 30. In simple terms, it is the revenue anticipated from contracts with non-cancelable obligations.

Anthropic anticipates realizing about 75% of the obligation in the next 12 months based on customer utilization and delivery by the company.

Wall Street gets a complicated vote and an expensive AI bet

Buying shares won’t mean buyers get much say over the company. Anthropic plans to remain a Delaware public benefit corporation, which means it must weigh its stated public mission alongside the financial interests of shareholders.

Its Long-Term Benefit Trust generally controls who occupies a majority of board seats through Class T shares.

A separate company representing the founders is expected to hold a Class F share with 50.1% of voting power on general shareholder decisions, including elections for directors outside the trust-controlled seats.

Ordinary investors will receive Class A shares, with one vote per share. That’s a lot of voting structure to read before hitting the buy button.

The timing is tricky, too. Anthropic’s potential debut follows SpaceX’s $85.7 billion IPO, the biggest ever, just months earlier. Shares of Elon Musk’s company have swung sharply since listing on Nasdaq and ended last week a little below their opening price in June.

Speculation is rising about whether the need for AI products justifies the investment of trillions of dollars in infrastructure needed. Firms that provide rental computing power have felt the pinch.

CoreWeave and Nebius, which are referred to as neocloud firms, both lost in excess of 30% of their market valuation in October amid heightened focus on borrowing risks in the data centers industry.

However, there were signs of strength in Monday’s pre-market session as the prices of crude oil moved lower.

Futures contracts for the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased by 209 points or 0.4%, those for S&P 500 were up 0.4%, and those for Nasdaq-100 went higher by 0.7%.

As far as chip stocks were concerned, Nvidia was up 1.4%, Micron went up 2.3%, Broadcom increased by 1.5%, and AMD climbed 1.3%.