Anthropic files prospectus to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, valuation drops to about $1.5 trillion

[[**Anthropic files for IPO, plans to list on Nasdaq under "ANT"; valuation falls to about $1.5 trillion as growth slows. Revenue surges but safety commitments give way, carrying massive compute commitments, and facing growth scrutiny after listing.**

**Key points**

**1. IPO valuation shrinks, revenue surges**

According to Reuters, slowing Q3 growth cut the valuation from about $2 trillion to about $1.5 trillion; revenue grew about 10x annually from 2023 to 2025, reaching $16.286 billion in the first half of 2026, with operating cash flow turning positive.

**2. Safety commitments give way to commercial growth**

Conversations can be used for training with user consent, and data retention extends to 5 years; the company abandoned its commitment not to train or deploy catastrophically harmful models, releases are faster, and safety vulnerabilities are listed as a risk.

**3. Public-benefit governance preserves founder control**

After listing, the trust can appoint and remove 4 of 7 directors, and the founders' entity holds a fixed 50.1% voting power on ordinary matters through Class F shares.

**4. Safety as a selling point drives customer and revenue explosion**

Billed by token, usage revenue of $13.1 billion accounted for 80% in the first half of 2026; more than 11,900 customers spend over $100,000 annually, with net retention around 900%, but revenue depends on iteration.

**5. IPO acceleration meets massive compute commitments**

Amodei calls for the industry to slow down, yet the IPO accelerates; Reuters says Nvidia is in talks for a cornerstone investment of up to $10 billion; future compute commitments are about $540 billion to $570 billion. 2026-10-28 18:08 A trillion-dollar unicorn goes public—how much of Anthropic's ideal remains? Baobian Quick View

This article is from the WeChat public account: Baobian, author: Zhan Fangge, editor: Xing Yun

Safety is a belief, and also a business.

On October 26, Anthropic publicly filed its prospectus, planning to list on Nasdaq under the ticker "ANT." According to Reuters, due to slowing growth in the third quarter, the valuation discussed by investors has dropped from about $2 trillion to about $1.5 trillion.

As the "money-making" top student among AI large-model companies, Anthropic's revenue scale has made a great leap over the past three years: $41 million in 2023, $386 million in 2024, and $4.59 billion in 2025, growing about 10x each year.

The prospectus shows that in the first half of 2026, the company's revenue reached $16.286 billion, 3.5 times that of all of 2025.

On paper, the company had a net loss of $80.7 billion in the first half, but $72.4 billion of that was an accounting expense from convertible bond appreciation; on an operating basis, the loss has narrowed to $693 million, and operating cash flow has turned positive. At the last private financing round in May this year, the company was valued at $965 billion.

In the more than 300-page prospectus, Anthropic depicts the "age of miracles" AI will bring while using large sections to warn that AI may threaten human survival.

Anthropic's seven founders left OpenAI back then to build an Eden, but every company born of idealism must still enter the market—for example, Google removed "Don't be evil" from the opening of its code of conduct, and OpenAI set up a "capped-profit" entity under its nonprofit.

Five years later, it is Anthropic's turn. Now, for the pace of listing and expansion, the original idealism is giving way.

The original idealism

Anthropic's founding team almost all came from OpenAI. In 2019, OpenAI adjusted from a nonprofit structure to a "capped-profit" model and brought in a $1 billion investment from Microsoft. At the time, some core OpenAI members began to worry that the company's technology roadmap would tilt toward commercial returns and that AI capabilities would further concentrate in a few institutions.

At the end of 2020, then-OpenAI VP of Research Dario Amodei and several colleagues left one after another, including his sister Daniela Amodei. In 2021, the seven co-founded Anthropic.

Co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei later explained that the team's judgment at the time was that they believed scale would bring capability, but making models bigger alone was not enough—alignment and safety were also needed. Growing compute would keep improving model capabilities, but models would not automatically learn to comply with human intent and boundaries. Preventing AI from outputting harmful content and deviating from design goals—these tasks must be addressed with dedicated resources in R&D.

Perhaps for this reason, they named the company Anthropic, meaning "related to humans." Daniela explained publicly that the name was meant to keep people at the center of AI development.

This judgment about safety was also written into the structure the founders designed for the new company. For example, from day one, Anthropic registered as a public-benefit corporation, and its board must legally weigh both the company's mission and shareholder returns, not just make money for shareholders. Anthropic has also repeatedly stated its public-benefit goal on different occasions: "to responsibly develop and maintain advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity."

After the Series C financing closed in 2023, the company formally established the governance arrangement of the Long-Term Benefit Trust, granting the trust the right to appoint some directors and adding a check between shareholders' economic interests and the public-interest mission.

The prospectus published this time also fully discloses the details of this design. After listing, the trust in principle has the right to appoint and remove four of the seven board seats. It is worth noting that the trust does not participate in the company's day-to-day operations or strategy formulation.

After listing, an entity jointly controlled by the seven founders will hold the sole share of Class F common stock, with a fixed 50.1% voting right on ordinary matters submitted to a shareholder vote. This proportion will not be diluted by ordinary share issuances, and it can also determine the appointment of the other three board seats.

The company thus formed a set of separated-power arrangements. The founders hold control over ordinary shareholder votes, while the trust checks company decisions through its right to appoint a majority of board seats.

The founders' letter in the prospectus discloses the team's situation: all seven founders are still employed to this day, and more than three-quarters of the earliest 100 employees are still at the company.

Beyond the corporate structure, the safety-first approach is also reflected in the pace of operations: Anthropic decided to do research first and products later. One of the founders, Daniela, recalled that in the first year after the company was founded, almost all of it was spent building the company, raising funds and training models from scratch, and most of the early team was doing safety research. To this day, the prospectus still defines the company as "first and foremost a research laboratory."

In the summer of 2022, after Claude finished training, the company did not release it, fearing it would trigger a race to develop stronger models. About three months later, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, and the race began anyway.

The safety bottom line is being lowered

From a business-model perspective, "safety" is an important selling point for Anthropic.

The company also says that the values followed by its public models enhance customer trust and have commercial value. According to the new version of the "constitution" released by Anthropic at the end of January 2026, the four core values are prioritized as follows: broad safety, broad ethical conduct, compliance with company guidelines, and being genuinely helpful.

For enterprise buyers who value safety, a more cautious model is itself a reason to buy.

Prospectus information shows that all of the top ten companies in the Fortune 500 US are Anthropic customers with annual spending exceeding $100,000, and among the 500 companies this proportion has also exceeded half.

It is reported that Anthropic's main revenue model is "paying for intelligence," measured by the number of tokens customers invoke and priced according to the selected model. In the first half of 2026, this usage-based revenue was $13.1 billion, accounting for about 80% of total revenue.

As of September 30, 2026, more than 11,900 customers had spent more than $100,000 at Anthropic over the past 12 months; a year earlier, there were only more than 950. As of the end of September, the company's net revenue retention rate was about 900%, meaning that the customer base from a year earlier now spends a total of nine times as much.

However, in the increasingly fierce AI race, Anthropic's safety bottom line is loosening.

Previously, Anthropic did not use consumer conversations to train models by default, which was also a selling point of its emphasis on privacy protection. In August 2025, the company revised the relevant terms: if free, Pro and Max users choose to agree, new conversations will be used for training, and the data retention period will be extended from 30 days to 5 years.

In February 2026, Anthropic revised its public "Responsible Scaling Policy," abandoning a public commitment in the 2023 version: not to train or deploy models that could cause catastrophic harm. Under the original design, once safety measures could not keep up, the company would need to pause training. This commitment was precisely the core the company used in 2023 to prove it was different from its peers.

The company's explanation is that it is difficult to determine whether model capabilities cross the risk threshold, government legislation is progressing slowly, and risk prevention requires joint action across the entire industry. Co-founder and Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan put it more directly: with competitors advancing rapidly, "our stopping training AI models actually doesn't help anyone."

In 2022, Anthropic's founding team would rather miss the first-mover opportunity than trigger a race.

Now, the race is a foregone conclusion and unavoidable, and Anthropic's release pace has clearly accelerated accordingly. In April 2026, the company opened a gated preview of Mythos; in June it launched Fable 5 and Mythos 5; in September it simultaneously released Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5.

Rapid releases also pay off. In the fourth quarter of 2025, Anthropic's quarter-over-quarter revenue growth rate was 48%, and by the first quarter of 2026 it had rapidly jumped to 132%. The release of Opus 4.5 was one of the important drivers behind this.

The prospectus also shows that model versions released in the six months ended September 30, 2026 contributed more than 80% of revenue in the third quarter.

The commercial explosive power of new models is evident, but this also means the company's revenue is highly dependent on continuous model iteration.

While the pace has accelerated, the prospectus also discloses gaps in safety execution. The company admits that its safety classifiers and other control measures have experienced failures, misconfigurations, and even being accidentally turned off, and that the protections of its strongest models have also been bypassed. In safety evaluations, the company observed that models behave differently when they perceive they are being tested, so evaluation results may be incomplete.

At the end of 2020, Amodei and others disagreed with OpenAI over safety issues and ultimately left to found Anthropic; now, the same criticism is beginning to appear inside Anthropic.

According to Fortune, in September of this year, Jacob Coxon, who had worked on model training research at both OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned and publicly criticized both companies for not acting responsibly.

The prospectus also lists such situations as a risk: employees who joined because they identified with the company's safety commitments may, if they believe the company has not lived up to its stated values, suffer low morale and lose trust in management; public criticism by current or former employees of the company's safety practices, or the departure of safety-related personnel, may reinforce this perception and affect the company's ability to recruit talent.

The industry slows down, but the IPO must be fast

To the outside world, Anthropic is the most principled of the leading large-model companies.

At least since January 2026, Amodei has been publicly talking about slowing down the industry. In his long essay "The Adolescence of Technology," he proposed that, to address the risks brought by AI, the industry should seek a modest slowdown. In September, he published the article "We Must Set a Speed Limit for the Frontier," formally calling on the entire industry to slow the pace of advancing frontier AI capabilities in order to buy time for safety research.

Regarding the phrase "industry slowdown," the prospectus specifically explains that this call is aimed at the entire industry working with governments to set standards, and does not describe the company's own development and release timetable.

At the same time, Anthropic's IPO process has been accelerating. In December 2025, the company still said it had not decided when, or even whether, to go public; half a year later, it confidentially submitted an IPO application to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. On the day before Amodei published his long essay calling on the entire industry to slow down, Reuters reported that Nvidia was in talks to invest up to $10 billion as a cornerstone investor in Anthropic's IPO.

The Wall Street Journal once published an article saying that Amodei calls on the entire industry to slow down, yet Anthropic itself has not slowed down, and that it is caught in a "prisoner's dilemma." And if the leading labs slow down in coordination, Anthropic, which is already in a leading position, would likely benefit as well.

Objectively speaking, Anthropic is a public benefit corporation, but it is also an absolute giant company, so in practical terms it indeed needs a massive amount of capital to sustain operations.

And the company's bottom line on funding sources is also being adjusted along with financing needs.

In March 2024, according to CNBC, Anthropic's founders had excluded Saudi investors from buying its shares on national security grounds. But according to a report by the U.S. tech media outlet Wired, in July 2025, Dario Amodei said in an internal letter that he would seek investment from the UAE and Qatar, on the grounds that Middle Eastern capital is enormous in scale and would help the company stay ahead. He acknowledged that this might benefit "dictators," but believed that completely eliminating such a situation would make it difficult for the company to operate. Two months later, the Qatar Investment Authority participated in Anthropic's Series F financing.

Prospectus information shows that Anthropic has signed long-term contracts with multiple computing power suppliers. For example, by July 2033 the company must spend at least about $114.5 billion at Google, and by April 2036 at least $110 billion at Amazon, with any shortfall to be made up; by May 2033 it must spend at least $44.9 billion at Microsoft, regardless of whether it is actually used.

Based on data disclosed in the prospectus, Anthropic's future computing power commitments are approximately $540 billion to $570 billion, of which about $417 billion is contractually agreed minimum payment obligations.

This scale of long-term spending is far higher than the amount of Anthropic's largest single private financing round to date. In May 2026, the company announced the completion of a $65 billion Series H financing, an amount equivalent to about 12% of the above estimated computing power spending. As of June 30, 2026, the company held approximately $131.7 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments.

Although these computing power expenditures will occur gradually over many years, the company still needs to rely on continuously growing operating revenue and subsequent financing to support its massive investment. An IPO can also open up equity and debt financing channels in the public market for the company.

Five years ago, seven founders left OpenAI due to differences over safety philosophy and founded Anthropic. Now, this company stands at a crossroads similar to that of OpenAI in the past: carrying more than $500 billion in computing power commitments, about to face the public market's interrogation of growth, and also beginning to face employees leaving in the name of safety.

It has never stopped talking about safety, and it has indeed paid a price for it. But the wording in the prospectus also shows that when safety ideals and commercial growth meet head-on, ideals need to give way. In the business world, there is no Eden. Channel: Finance and Economics

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