Anthropic Files to List as ANT With an $80.7 Billion Paper Loss and Founders in Control

The AI lab whose own paperwork warns that advanced AI could pose "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity" now wants Wall Street to own a piece of it. Anthropic, PBC filed its Form S-1 with the SEC on Monday, putting months of leaks and confidential drafts on the public record. The company says it intends to list its Class A shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker ANT. Share count and price range have not been set.

That puts the maker of Claude ahead of OpenAI in the race to Wall Street, at least on paper. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley lead 22 underwriters, according to CNBC. An S-1 is a plan, not a closing bell.

A loss made of paper

The headline number is ugly. Anthropic reported a net loss of $80.7 billion for the six months ended June 30, 2026, against $12.9 billion a year earlier. Most of it never left the building. The filing shows a $72.4 billion charge for the change in fair value of convertible notes, derivative liabilities and SAFEs, which Anthropic says was "primarily driven by an increase in the fair value of our outstanding convertible promissory notes resulting from an increase in our enterprise valuation." Another $8.8 billion of other expense came mostly from fair value accounting on note purchase agreements, the S-1 says.

In plain terms, investors lent Anthropic money that converts into stock. As the valuation climbed, those future shares grew more valuable, and Anthropic had to book that increase as a loss. The richer the company looks, the bigger the loss it reports.

Strip it out and the picture changes sharply. Anthropic's operating loss for the half was just $693 million, down from $2.1 billion a year earlier, according to the filing. It actually generated $3.9 billion in cash from operating activities, compared with burning $1.5 billion in the same stretch of 2025. Capital hungry, yes. Cash incinerator, no.

Revenue is the line investors will stare at: $16.29 billion in the first half, up 1,304% from $1.16 billion. More than 11,900 customers paid Anthropic $100,000 or more over the trailing 12 months, the filing says.

Buyers of ANT should know what they are not getting, which is control. Anthropic plans to issue a single share of Class F stock to a Founder LLC owned by its seven co-founders, including Dario and Daniela Amodei. That one share carries 50.1% of the voting power, with no economic rights. Separately, the Long-Term Benefit Trust elects a majority of the board.

Anthropic does not pretend this is normal. The S-1 says its structure "has no direct public company precedent" and warns it "may effectively eliminate the ability of holders of our Class A common stock to influence important decisions, including a change in control."

"As a result, our governance structure may make it more difficult to replace our directors and management and may have the effect of depriving our stockholders of an opportunity to sell their shares at a premium over prevailing market prices." Anthropic S-1 filing

Founder control is hardly new in tech. Pairing it with a public benefit mandate and a mission trust is. Anthropic is asking the market to trust its judgment twice over.

The price of that trust is still a guess. The filing sets no valuation. MIT Sloan professor Sinan Aral told CNBC that the $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion valuation floated by analysts implies a steep multiple.

"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." Sinan Aral, MIT Sloan

The leaked draft already exposed Anthropic's roughly $42 billion 2025 loss, covered in our look at the prospectus numbers, and its existential risk warnings, which we reported separately. What the filing says about Claude writing Anthropic's own code is a separate story.

The bet is simple to state and hard to price. Revenue is soaring, operating cash flow has turned positive, and the founders have made sure no buyer can tell them what to do with it.