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Anthropic files SEC prospectus, bringing AI lab a step closer to historic offering: Live updates

www.cnbc.com · October 26, 2026 · 13:05

This is CNBC's live coverage of Anthropic's historic IPO filing.

Anthropic is officially headed for the public market in what is expected to be a historic offering for a five-year-old company that's been at the heart of the generative artificial intelligence boom.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Anthropic said it plans to list on the Nasdaq under ticker symbol "ANT."

The company behind Claude confidentially filed with the SEC in June, giving the agency time to review its financials before they were made available to the public and prospective investors.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei co-founded the company in 2021 after he and a small group of researchers defected from OpenAI, now its chief rival. Anthropic's Claude model and services have captivated the corporate world, as companies have opened their wallets in an effort to crack new growth opportunities and find internal efficiencies.

Expansion has accelerated in 2026, driven largely by the popularity of AI coding tool Claude Code, and powerful models including Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The company has been racing to maintain an edge over competitors like OpenAI and Google, and faced sharp criticism over its positions on safety, regulation and national security, leading to two high-profile disputes with the U.S. government in recent months.

Anthropic's offering, if it doesn't get derailed, will land just a few months after Elon Musk's SpaceX debuted on the Nasdaq in by far the biggest IPO on record, ultimately raising $85.7 billion. It's been a volatile stretch for SpaceX shares, which finished last week slightly below where they opened in June.

As it prepares to hit the market, Anthropic has to contend with severe jitters on Wall Street as concerns grow over whether spending on AI services will justify the trillions of dollars in expected infrastructure costs. So-called neoclouds like CoreWeave and Nebius have been hammered of late, losing over 30% of their value in October as credit risk is rising across the data center space.

CNBC's reporters are covering Anthropic's IPO from bureaus in San Francisco and Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

Sinan Aral, MIT Sloan Professor and AI investor, said on CNBC's "Squawk Box" that Anthropic's ability to be profitable in the enterprise space will determine whether it's an attractive prospect for investors.

"If you think about the $1.5 to $2 trillion valuation, that's approximately from the low to high end a 22 times to 30 times revenue multiple. So the future growth and the profit of this company are being priced in that kind of valuation," Aral said.

"The question is, where is the enduring value? And I think the enduring value is going to come from companies that can demonstrate enterprise profitability, productivity, and actual value add, rather than just providing intelligence. I think Anthropic is on the way to doing that ... and I think that is where it will succeed and fail."

With so many companies relying on Anthropic, the company can say that its business has greater diversification than top artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia.

"No single customer represented more than 10% of our revenue for the nine months ended September 30, 2026," Anthropic said in its IPO prospectus.

Nvidia, by comparison, had five clients that were contributing at least 10% of accounts receivable as of July, according to a filing.

Anthropic, for its part, reported that five customers accounted for about a quarter of its revenue for the first nine months of 2026.

"We anticipate that we will continue to derive a significant portion of our revenue from a limited number of customers for the foreseeable future, and in some cases, the portion of our revenue attributable to certain customers may increase in the future," the AI lab said in the prospectus.

At the end of 2026, revenue from customers that buy through cloud marketplaces represented 48% of revenue, the filing shows.

Anthropic said it lost a staggering $80.7 billion in the first six months of this year, after losing $12.9 billion over the same stretch in 2025.

For all of 2025, the company lost about $41.9 billion, widening from a loss of $8.3 billion in 2024.

Anthropic said revenue increased 1,304% to $16.29 billion in the six months ended June 30, up from $1.16 billion during the same period a year earlier. Revenue for all of last year jumped 1,089% to $4.59 billion.

At the top of the prospectus for Anthropic's historic initial public offering, the two biggest investment banks for technology IPOs receive the largest billing. The lead left, as the term is called for the underwriter listed first, is Goldman Sachs. On the right is Morgan Stanley.

Others banks participating in the share float include JP Morgan, Citigroup, Barclays, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, RBC Capital Markets, UBS Investment Bank, BMO Capital Markets, BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole CIB, Jefferies, Mizuho, MUFG, Societe Generale, TD Securities, BTIG, Cantor, Capital One Securities and Macquarie Capital.

Amodei grew up in San Francisco and earned his doctorate degree in biophysics from Princeton University.

Prior to starting Anthropic, Amodei, now 43, worked as a senior research scientist at Google Brain, which is now part of AI unit Google DeepMind. Amodei also spent more than four years at OpenAI, where he led the development of models including GPT-2 and GPT-3.

His sister, Daniela Amodei, is another Anthropic co-founder and serves as the company's president.

Anthropic closed its last funding round in May, when it raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation. The financing was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, and nearly tripled Anthropic's valuation from February, when the company was worth $380 billion.

The round was particularly notable because it pushed Anthropic's valuation above OpenAI's for the first time. OpenAI was valued at $852 billion in late March after closing a record-breaking $122 billion funding round.