Anthropic Releases Prospectus, Valuation of $1.5 Trillion to $2 Trillion

An unprecedented myth of wealth creation.

Last night (October 26), Anthropic publicly released its prospectus for the first time, planning to list on Nasdaq with a valuation of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion. At this scale, it will surpass the record set by SpaceX in June this year and become the largest IPO in history.

Five years ago, the Amodei siblings left OpenAI with a group of colleagues and started from scratch. Roughly calculated at a $2 trillion valuation, the stakes held by the seven co-founders will each be worth more than $27 billion. Beyond the venture capital world welcoming a super return, there are even more lucky ones—a large number of Anthropic employees will await a window to cash in their wealth.

After two or three years on the job, the options in their hands have soared by more than 5,000%, and their net worth has surged by nearly $100 million. Rough statistics show that Anthropic's early employees will become the main force in this round of wealth creation: most of them joined between 2021 and 2023, with positions concentrated in programmer-type roles such as core researchers in pre-training/safety alignment and first-generation ML engineers. The company has even begun to worry that once employees achieve financial freedom, they will become harder to retain.

AI is creating new wealth stories at a dizzying speed. Almost at the same time, on the newly released 2026 Hurun Rich List, Zhang Yiming set a new record as the richest person, and Liang Wenfeng entered the top ten on his first appearance. A generation has ushered in its golden age.

This may be the craziest prospectus in history.

The growth rate is truly rapid: in 2023, Anthropic's revenue was only $41 million, and in 2024 and 2025 it grew to $386 million and $4.585 billion respectively. By the first half of this year, that figure reached an astonishing $16.286 billion, a year-on-year increase of about 1,300%.

However, the losses are equally astonishing—the company's net loss for the full year of 2025 was about $41.965 billion, and in the first half of 2026 it soared to $80.748 billion. Of that, $72.4 billion came from changes in the fair value of convertible notes, derivative liabilities and other financing instruments. At the same time, computing power and infrastructure costs reached as high as $8.945 billion, exceeding the full year of last year.

Claude's capabilities grow stronger by the day and are being used by more and more enterprises for programming and handling work. The prospectus shows that as of the end of September 2026, over the past 12 months more than 11,900 customers contributed at least $100,000 in revenue, including more than half of the Fortune 500 companies, compared with only more than 950 a year earlier.

But this is a money-devouring beast. According to disclosures, Anthropic plans to purchase more than $600 billion of cloud computing, computing power and infrastructure over the next decade, with relevant suppliers including Broadcom, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, SpaceXAI, AMD and so on.

The people in power have surfaced. The prospectus shows that seven co-founders, including CEO Dario Amodei and President Daniela Amodei, will hold special Class F shares through a specially established entity, thereby giving the founding team 50.1% of shareholder voting rights.

Back in 2021, Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela Amodei left OpenAI and, with a group of core members, started from scratch to found Anthropic, a name with a certain declarative meaning—AI that belongs to humanity.

The siblings have a clear division of labor: Dario serves as CEO, leading research and product direction; Daniela serves as president, responsible for operations, commercialization and the talent system. Unlike OpenAI, which relied on ChatGPT to be the first to open up the consumer market, Anthropic chose another path: starting with enterprise customers.

Anthropic's bet paid off. In programming scenarios, enterprises are willing to pay a premium for higher code generation quality and lower security risks. Everyone knows the story that followed: Claude Code rose to become a mainstream tool among developers, and the once-obscure Anthropic leaped to become OpenAI's biggest rival.

In just five years, a brother and sister who left OpenAI now run the world's largest AI company.

Investors are about to cash out

A little later than expected, a wealth feast beyond imagination has surfaced.

In early 2023, Anthropic was valued at about $4.1 billion, rising to about $18.5 billion the following year. By 2025, that figure reached $183 billion, and in this year's $30 billion Series G financing it further reached a crazy $380 billion.

The latest scene was in May this year, when Anthropic announced the completion of its Series H financing, raising as much as $65 billion, with a post-investment valuation of $965 billion—just a step away from the trillion-dollar mark, making it the world's most valuable AI unicorn.

To date, Anthropic is backed by the world's top venture capital and technology capital, with dozens of institutions including Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Salesforce and Sequoia Capital placing bets to grab a ticket aboard a super company of the AI era.

A historic moment is finally coming. Whether they entered early or late, investors will make a fortune—a typical example is Spark Capital, which invested $75 million in the then newly founded Anthropic in 2023, and whose stake is now worth about $7 billion, a return of nearly 100 times;

Menlo Ventures, which made a big bet as early as the Series D round, has seen its holdings swell to $14 billion; even Sound Ventures, co-founded by Hollywood star Ashton Kutcher, has gotten a piece of the pie.

In the AI race, the ceiling may just be the floor. Iconiq, which poured hundreds of millions into the company at a $183 billion valuation, may have directly doubled its money on a single bet. There is also Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC, which Bloomberg reported injected over $4.5 billion for a 1% stake, with a book value of nearly $10 billion based on the latest financing valuation.

Tech giants have also profited handsomely. Google, Amazon and others are both infrastructure suppliers to Anthropic and injected huge amounts of cash early on, becoming among its largest investors. They are not only making money by selling computing power, but also earning extremely high premiums on their equity investments.

A scramble begins in the matchmaking market, and a wave of employees is lining up to get rich

A windfall of wealth is likewise about to descend on Anthropic's employees.

In fact, as early as the beginning of this year, Anthropic was planning to let current and former employees who had served for a full year sell part of their holdings, corresponding to a company valuation of about $350 billion. The prospectus shows that this transaction was completed in April, with shareholders including employees selling a total of about 180 million shares, amounting to roughly $4.66 billion at the transaction price.

Now, cashing in that paper wealth has a timetable. Although specific shareholding details have not yet been disclosed, a picture of this grand scene can be seen by piecing together information from various sources:

For early core employees, combined paper gains could reach $5 million to $20 million, while top key staff and leads could reach $30 million to over $100 million; for mid-stage employees who joined in 2024 and later, a full four-year option package is worth about $2 million to $8 million.

Foreign media reported a real case: a mid-level technician joined Anthropic in 2024 with a $400,000 salary plus $1.3 million in equity. By July 2026, as the company's valuation rose from $18 billion to $965 billion, the equity in his hands soared by more than 5,000%, reaching $72 million.

"Working at an AI company preparing to go public, with stock in hand that may appreciate"—this is the hot profile in Silicon Valley's dating market right now, for no other reason than that a single options package can directly achieve a leap in wealth. And employees of OpenAI and Anthropic have ranked in the "first tier" for spouse selection. Silicon Valley matchmakers are already busy.

But the company has gained a new headache as a result. Whether it can retain this group of billionaires has been written into the risk warnings. The prospectus discloses that some early employees have accumulated considerable paper wealth through equity, which may make it harder for the company to retain and motivate some employees. At the same time, the supply of top technical talent is limited, and industry competition has intensified significantly.

To attract and retain talent, Anthropic continues to ramp up equity incentives. The prospectus discloses that this year the board approved the grant of about 91 million new RSUs, with an aggregate grant-date fair value of about $5.8 billion. These awards generally require four years of continued service, with vesting conditions met quarterly. In addition, the equity incentive pool will add new reserved shares each year for the next decade.

This is a genuine dividend of the era.

According to Forbes statistics, this year's global rich list already includes at least 86 billionaires whose wealth is related to AI, 45 of whom crossed that threshold for the first time in the past year. Steven Hao, 30, co-founder of Cognition, became the youngest person on the Forbes 400 with an estimated net worth of $5.8 billion.

Let us shift our gaze to the other side of the ocean. At the beginning of the year, Zhipu and MiniMax successively listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and Liu Debing, Tang Jie and Yan Junjie subsequently joined the ranks of Forbes billionaires. The latest "2026 Hurun Rich List" shows that more than 160 listees derived their wealth from AI. In 2019 and before, there were no listees whose main business was AI.

Among them, 41-year-old DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng made the list for the first time, ranking seventh with an estimated fortune of 280 billion yuan. Zhang Yiming set a new record for China's richest person with 670 billion yuan, returning to the top spot.

This article is from the WeChat public account "Investment World" (ID: pedaily2012), authored by Yu Mengying and Wang Lu, and published by 36Kr with authorization.