Anthropic, the AI lab behind Claude, has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, submitting a draft registration statement to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing follows the company’s Series H funding round and a sharp acceleration in enterprise revenue, though the path to profitability remains a key question for prospective public investors.

What is Covered in This Article:

  • Anthropic has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 to the SEC, with a potential public listing as early as October 2026.
  • The filing comes days after Anthropic closed a $65B Series H round at a $965B post-money valuation, surpassing OpenAI.
  • Run-rate revenue reached $47B as of late May 2026, up from $9B at the end of 2025, driven primarily by enterprise adoption and Claude Code.
  • Anthropic’s gross-versus-net revenue accounting practice inflates headline figures relative to net-reporting peers – a question the full S-1 will need to resolve.
  • Anthropic projects positive cash flow by 2027–2028, in contrast to OpenAI’s more extended burn trajectory.

The News: Anthropic has confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering of its common stock. The company noted this gives it the option to go public after the SEC completes its review, and that the number of shares and price have not yet been set. Anthropic is targeting a possible public listing as early as October 2026 and has reportedly engaged law firm Wilson Sonsini, which managed Google’s 2004 IPO, to assist with public-market readiness.

Anthropic Files For IPO, Looking to Beat OpenAI to the Punch

Analyst Take: The headline run-rate figures Anthropic has disclosed – $9 billion at end-2025, $30 billion in April, $47 billion at the time of the Series H – reflect genuine business growth at an unusual pace. The filing comes earlier than expected, as the Claude maker looks to beat its primary rival, OpenAI, to fresh funding. A confidential S-1 submission is not an IPO. It opens a regulatory review window. The actual decision to list will depend on market conditions, the SEC’s review timeline, and whether the company’s audited financials withstand the level of scrutiny public markets demand.

The timing is, of course, deliberate. On May 28, Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H funding round at a $965 billion post-money valuation, leapfrogging OpenAI’s $852 billion mark. Filing within days of that close is a clear signal that this is intended to be Anthropic’s last private fundraise.

The Revenue Number Is Real – But It Needs Unpacking

Anthropic’s revenue trajectory has been steep, to put it mildly: $87 million run rate in January 2024, $1 billion by December 2024, $9 billion by the end of 2025, $14 billion in February 2026, $19 billion in March, $30 billion in April. By the time of the Series H announcement, run-rate revenue had crossed $47 billion. Claude Code, Anthropic’s agentic coding tool, launched publicly in mid-2025 and has become the fastest-growing product in the company’s history, hitting $1 billion in annualized revenue within six months of launch and generating over $2.5 billion in run-rate revenue by February 2026. However, these figures are not directly comparable to the revenue numbers most public software companies report, and that distinction matters considerably for investors building a valuation model.

The Gross-Versus-Net Revenue Question: What the S-1 Will Resolve

Anthropic reports revenue from its cloud partners AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud on a gross basis, i.e., booking the full amount billed through those channels, including the cloud providers’ share, as its top-line revenue. The cloud partners’ portions are then listed as sales and marketing costs on the expense side. Both approaches are permissible under US GAAP. Anthropic positions itself as the primary provider and treats cloud providers as distribution channels. However, OpenAI takes the opposite position, treating Microsoft as the primary provider for Azure-routed sales. Both are defensible accounting positions. But they produce very different revenue headlines for economically similar transactions.

So when a customer purchases $1 worth of tokens through a cloud partner, OpenAI counts its approximate 20-cent cut as revenue. Anthropic counts the whole $1. The percentages that each company receives from its partnerships vary, which makes direct comparison difficult, but the directional effect is clear.

None of this negates the growth story. Even on a net basis, Anthropic’s growth rate is exceptional by any historical comparison in enterprise software. The gap between the disclosed run-rate figure and what the audited GAAP income statement will show is, however, likely to be the single most-discussed line in the S-1 when it becomes public. Anyone trying to evaluate the IPO will need to work from the net revenue figure and the fully-loaded gross margin, not the run-rate numbers that have defined the private-market narrative to date.

What About Profits?

The profitability picture is also pretty nuanced. Anthropic has told investors it projects its first-ever quarterly operating profit of $559 million in this quarter (Q2 2026) on revenue of $10.9 billion, which would represent a 130% increase from the $4.8 billion it reported in Q1. That would make Anthropic the first frontier AI lab to post a quarterly operating profit. However, the company has been explicit that this may not hold: planned data center spending could push subsequent quarters back into the red.

Longer-term projections shared with investors point to $70 billion in revenue and $17 billion in cash flow by 2028, with gross margins improving from roughly 50% today toward 77% by that point, though the company must sustain an estimated $80 billion in cloud infrastructure costs through 2029 to get there. All of these figures originate from internal projections shared in a fundraising context and reported by The Wall Street Journal and The Information; none have been audited or publicly confirmed by Anthropic, but we’ll find out soon with the S-1.

Enterprise Concentration

Approximately 80% of Anthropic’s revenue is derived from enterprise clients, with 8 of the Fortune 10 companies among its paying users. The number of enterprise customers with annualized spending exceeding $1 million doubled from 500 in February 2026 to more than 1,000 by early April. That level of enterprise concentration indicates pricing power and genuine stickiness.

The Compute Dependency

Anthropic recently signed agreements with Amazon for up to five gigawatts of new capacity, with Google and Broadcom for five gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity, and with SpaceX for access to GPU capacity in Colossus 1 and Colossus 2. Such are the infrastructure commitments required to sustain current growth. For public investors, understanding the terms, durations, and financial obligations embedded in these agreements will be central to any valuation exercise.

What to Watch:

  • The S-1 will disclose audited financials for the first time; the gross margin and compute cost line items will likely reset consensus expectations in one direction or the other.
  • The principal-versus-agent revenue classification will be a focus of SEC review and institutional investor scrutiny. The outcome will determine whether the public income statement resembles the run-rate figures disclosed to date.
  • Hyperscaler investment entanglement (Amazon, Google) raises governance and conflict-of-interest questions that reviewers and investors will probe, given these same parties are both capital providers and infrastructure vendors.
  • OpenAI’s own IPO process is a direct competitive variable: if OpenAI files or lists before Anthropic, it will affect the available institutional capital pool and comparative valuation framing.
  • SpaceX – although quite a different company from Anthropic or openAI – is likely to go public as early as next week with the largest IPO in history (so far).
  • The PBC (Public Benefit Corporation) structure is unusual for a public company and will require clear disclosure of how fiduciary duties to shareholders interact with Anthropic’s stated safety mission.
  • Inference economics and model commoditization risk remain the key long-term structural questions: at what point does competition compress margins regardless of enterprise lock-in?

See the brief announcement on Anthropic’s website.

Disclosure: Futurum is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum as a whole.

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Originally published by Futurum Group. Republished with attribution.