Anthropic is the San Francisco AI company that builds the Claude models and apps. It was incorporated as a Delaware public benefit corporation in January 2021 by seven co-founders, led by CEO Dario Amodei and President Daniela Amodei. Its S-1, filed with the SEC on 26 October 2026 to list Class A shares on Nasdaq under the symbol “ANT”, reports revenue of $16,286 million for the six months ended 30 June 2026, against $1,163 million a year earlier.
Most revenue is consumption-based: customers pay for the tokens they use. In the six months ended 30 June 2026, consumption revenue was $13,064 million and subscriptionrevenue $3,222 million.
02
Cloud marketplaces
Sales through cloud providers' marketplaces made up about 48% of revenue in the six months ended 30 June 2026, up from about 11% in 2023. The providers bill customers and pass the money on, net of fees.
As of 30 September 2026, more than 11,900 customers paid $100,000 or more on a trailing twelve-month basis, up from more than 950 a year earlier; about 250 paid $10 million or more.
04
Compute as the main cost
Compute and infrastructure cost $8,945 million in the first half of 2026. Per the S-1, it fell from 251% of revenue in the first quarter of 2025 to 48% in the second quarter of 2026.
What the S-1 shows (2025-26)
Revenue up about 14 times
Revenue was $41 million in 2023, $386 million in 2024 and $4,585 million in 2025. For the six months ended 30 June 2026 it was $16,286 million, about 14 times the same period of 2025 by our arithmetic. The S-1 states no valuation, price range or run-rate figure.
Operating income was $974 million in the three months ended 30 June 2026, after operating losses in each of the five earlier quarters shown. The net loss for the first half of 2026 was $80,748 million, mostly a $72,388 million change in the fair value of convertible notes and similar instruments.
Years of compute commitments
The S-1 lists at least $110.0 billion with Amazon from May 2026 to April 2036, at least about $114.5 billion with Google from April 2026 to July 2033, at least $44.9 billion with Microsoft from November 2026 to May 2033, and up to $120.5 billion with SpaceXAI for NVIDIA GPU compute into 2029.
Risks it names
The top five customers made up about 25% of revenue in the nine months ended 30 September 2026. The filing also reports the $1.5 billion Bartz copyright settlement, approved in July 2026, and a 25 September 2026 appeals decision that left a Department of War supply-chain risk designation in place; Anthropic has petitioned for rehearing.
Anthropic in the S-1
Revenue
Figure$4,585 million
PeriodYear ended 31 December 2025
Revenue
Figure$16,286 million
PeriodSix months ended 30 June 2026
Net loss
Figure$80,748 million
PeriodSix months ended 30 June 2026
Customers paying $100,000+ (TTM)
FigureMore than 11,900
PeriodAs of 30 September 2026
Employees
FigureAbout 5,300
PeriodAs of 30 September 2026
What it means for you
For investors: read the governance section first. A trust elects most of the board and a founders' vehicle holds 50.1% of the stockholder vote, so Class A buyers will not control the company.
For enterprise buyers: Claude is sold directly and through cloud marketplaces, which carried about 48% of revenue in the first half of 2026; buy through the channel where your cloud spend already sits.
For builders: plan for usage-based pricing. The S-1 says most revenue is consumption-based and much of it is not under long-term contracts.
For competitors: track compute, not headcount. The filing ties Anthropic's growth to multi-year commitments with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, SpaceXAI and others.
Update old references: figures such as “over 50 employees” describe the 2021-22 start-up; the S-1 reports about 5,300 employees as of 30 September 2026.
The Business Engineer lens
Anthropic’s S-1 shows a business whose revenue is mostly pay-as-you-use while its compute commitments run for years, so demand and capacity have to stay matched. The Business Engineer reads it as an infrastructure bet: the lab that secures compute and turns it into paid usage fastest sets the pace of the AI economy.
Anthropic is the AI company that builds Claude. It is a Delaware public benefit corporation, incorporated in January 2021, and filed an S-1 on 26 October 2026 to list on Nasdaq as “ANT”.
Who founded Anthropic?
The S-1 names seven co-founders: Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish and Christopher Olah.
Revenue was $4,585 million in 2025 and $16,286 million in the six months ended 30 June 2026, per the S-1, which states no run-rate figure.
Is Anthropic profitable?
It reported operating income of $974 million in the three months ended 30 June 2026, but a net loss of $80,748 million for the first half of 2026, mostly from fair-value changes on convertible notes.
The complete explainer, cleaned up and reformatted for mobile.
Anthropic is an American AI company that specializes in the development of general AI systems and language models. It is also a public-benefit corporation with a mission to use artificial intelligence responsibly.
History of Anthropic
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario and Daniela Amodei, a brother-and-sister team who are also former employees of OpenAI. The pair started the company with nine other OpenAI co-workers who shared a coherent vision for the future of AI research and safety.
In a podcast interview with the Future of Life Institute, Dario noted that “we [the team] were all working at OpenAI and trying to make this focused bet on basically scaling plus safety or safety with a lens towards scaling being a big part of the path to AGI… [we] just eventually came to the conclusion that it would be great to have an organization like top to bottom that was just focused on this bet and could make all strategic decisions with this bet in mind.”
This bet means Anthropic wants to make powerful AI systems less unpredictable, unreliable, and opaque. In more specific terms, the company’s objective is to incorporate safety principles into an AI industry that, like many others, favors power, efficiency and increasingly profit above all else.
Series A and Series B funding
Just months after the company was founded, it managed to raise $124 million in a Series A funding round led by Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn. Also involved were Dustin Moskovitz, James McClave, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and the Center for Emerging Risk Research.
In a post on its website announcing the deal, Anthropic noted the funds would be used to research and develop AI systems that were interpretable, steerable, reliable, and robust.
This was followed by a $580 million Series B funding round in April 2022 that was led by FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. Daniela Amodei noted the money would be used to explore the scaling properties of machine learning systems and how safety issues might emerge at scale.
While there are many similarities between Claude and ChatGPT, the former is trained on “Constitutional AI” principles and examples to make what Anthropic believes is a less harmful language assistant.
In February 2023, the company introduced a waitlist for early access to Claude.
Anthropic team
In addition to Dario and Daniela Amodei, Anthropic’s S-1, filed on 26 October 2026, names five other co-founders: Tom Brown, Jack Clark, Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish and Christopher Olah. The company had about 5,300 employees as of 30 September 2026. The early team also included:
Tom Brown – former lead engineer of GPT-3.
Chris Olah – who worked at Google Brain on scaling laws.
Sam McCandlish – former OpenAI research lead.
Catherine Olsson – a machine learning researcher and computer scientist who is a technical staff member.
Jack Clark – a co-founder who worked in policy, strategy, and communications at OpenAI.
Tom Henighan – like Olsson, Tom Henighan is a member of the technical staff who held a similar role at OpenAI.
Kamal Ndousse, Benjamin Mann, and Nicholas Joseph – all three round out Anthropic’s technical staff team and like Henighan, held similar roles at OpenAI.
Key takeaways
Anthropic is an American AI company that specializes in the development of general AI systems and language models. It is also a public-benefit corporation with a mission to use artificial intelligence responsibly.
Anthropic wants to make AI systems less unpredictable, unreliable, and opaque. To that end, the company’s objective is to incorporate safety principles into an AI industry that, like many others, prioritizes power and efficiency above all else.
Claude is the name of Anthropic’s language model assistant and the main rival to ChatGPT.
Key Highlights
Founding and Mission: Anthropic, founded in 2021 by Dario and Daniela Amodei along with nine former OpenAI colleagues, aims to develop general AI systems and language models while prioritizing safety and responsibility in AI development.
Funding Rounds: The company quickly secured significant funding, raising $124 million in a Series A round led by Jaan Tallinn and later $580 million in a Series B round led by Sam Bankman-Fried. Google invested nearly $400 million in early 2023 and, per the S-1, $10.0 billion in the May 2026 Series H.
Focus on Responsible AI: Anthropic seeks to make AI systems less unpredictable and more interpretable, reliable, and robust. It emphasizes incorporating safety principles into AI development amid an industry that often prioritizes power and efficiency over safety.
Claude, the Language Model: Anthropic’s language model assistant, Claude, rivals ChatGPT. Claude is trained on “Constitutional AI” principles to prioritize harm reduction in language processing.
Team: Anthropic had about 5,300 employees as of 30 September 2026, per its S-1; early key members included Tom Brown, Chris Olah, Sam McCandlish and Catherine Olsson, bringing expertise from OpenAI and Google Brain.
Public-Benefit Corporation: Anthropic operates as a public-benefit corporation, aligning its mission with broader societal goals of using AI responsibly and ethically.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
