Anthropic's IPO filing shows revenue up 14 times in a year

Anthropic, the maker of the Claude AI assistant, has filed to go public, and the paperwork gives a rare look at its books. First-half 2026 revenue was $16.3 billion, up about 14 times from a year earlier. The filing is called an S-1, the document a company must file before selling shares to the public. The numbers come from an analysis by investor and writer Michael Parekh.

What the filing shows

Quarterly revenue rose from $376 million in the first quarter of 2025 to $11.6 billion in the second quarter of 2026. The company also says it earned an operating profit of $974 million in that latest quarter. That was its first profit in the six quarters the filing shows.

Revenue per employee is over $6.6 million. Parekh compares that to Nvidia and notes that Anthropic sells software.

Where the money goes

Parekh breaks the first half of 2026 into every $100 of revenue. A year earlier, that same $100 carried about $284 of costs.

• About $14.60 went to cost of revenue, a gross margin of about 85 percent.
• About $60 went to research and development.
• About $23 went to sales and marketing, and $6 to general costs.
• The result was an operating loss of about $4.

Computing cost per dollar of revenue fell from $2.51 in early 2025 to 48 cents in the second quarter of 2026.

Two cautions apply. The 85 percent figure counts only the computing that serves paying customers. Some analysts put a fuller gross margin in the low 60s. The filing also warns that margins will swing, because most computing power is contracted 12 to 18 months ahead and extra short-term capacity costs more.

Who else gets paid

About 48 percent of first-half revenue came through the cloud marketplaces of Amazon (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, up from 11 percent in 2023. These companies also compete with Anthropic. Anthropic counts those sales at the full customer payment and treats the cloud's cut as a cost. OpenAI's reporting of similar sales has been described both ways, so the two companies' revenue is not yet directly comparable. OpenAI is likely to file next year.

Why it matters for buyers

The customer numbers show how early this is. More than 11,900 customers pay Anthropic $100,000 or more a year, up from more than 950. About 1,900 pay $1 million or more, and about 250 pay $10 million or more.

Anthropic says its Fortune 500 customers spend, on average, less than 0.1 percent of their total expenses on it. Parekh reads that as a sign that most companies are barely started, often using AI for little beyond summarizing meeting notes.