Anthropic Pushes Ahead With a Nasdaq Debut as Soon as Next Week, WSJ Reports, as Some Investors Press for a Valuation Below $1.5 Trillion

Updated November 10, 2026: Added The Wall Street Journal's report that Anthropic is pressing ahead with a listing as soon as next week. The new section directly below covers it; the November 3 and October 28 updates and the original October 27 report follow unchanged.

November 10: A debut date, and pressure on the price#

The timetable has held through the AI selloff; the valuation is what is moving. Anthropic plans to disclose its IPO price range in a filing early this week and begin trading on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT next Thursday or Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported on November 9, citing people familiar with the matter, according to accounts of the report by Investing.com and TechCrunch. Executives have meetings scheduled with key investors this week and have been working on the range with lead bankers Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the report said.

Some major investors are now pushing for a valuation below the roughly $1.5 trillion discussed as recently as last week, after the November 5 selloff that cut about $2.5 trillion from the market value of Nasdaq-listed companies, according to the same accounts. That target was already below the roughly $2 trillion floated months ago, and Bloomberg's sources had put a fair value at $1.8 trillion to $2 trillion when they first reported, on October 3, that marketing could start the week of November 9. Lenders have shown a similar wariness: Reuters reported on November 9 that some banks are reluctant to fund more AI deals even with Anthropic or Google backstops.

The price-range filing should also disclose how many shares Anthropic plans to sell and could reveal commitments from major investors, Investing.com wrote. The company could still delay if markets deteriorate, it added.

Limits of the November 10 update#

• The timetable and the investor pushback come from the WSJ's unnamed sources, which we read through Investing.com's and TechCrunch's accounts, not the WSJ original. Anthropic has not confirmed them.
• No price range had been filed when this update was written; any valuation figure here is investor talk, not a priced offering.

Updated November 3, 2026: Added third-quarter figures from Anthropic's amended S-1, filed on November 2, which reverse part of the cost trend described in the October 28 update. The new section directly below covers it; the earlier update and the original October 27 report follow unchanged.

November 3: The third quarter reverses the compute trend#

The amended filing fills in the quarter the original left blank, and it complicates the margin story we described on October 28. In the three months ended September 30, 2026, Anthropic's revenue was $16,956 million, up about 47% from $11,555 million in the second quarter. Reuters and CNBC both noted that this was a sharp slowdown from second-quarter growth of 144%.

Compute and infrastructure expenses grew faster than revenue. They were $9,863 million in the third quarter against $5,558 million in the second, which by our arithmetic is about 58% of revenue, up from about 48%. That ends the six-quarter decline the original filing showed. Anthropic says the quarter included "$5.0 billion of compute under short-term commitments, which currently costs significantly more than comparable compute procured under our multi-year commitments," and that this "reduced revenue per dollar of compute compared to the preceding quarter." It says it expects to use more short-term compute in the near term, compressing its margins.

Under GAAP, Anthropic swung to an operating loss of $567 million, from operating income of $974 million in the second quarter. It attributes the swing mainly to the short-term compute and to $2.0 billion of non-cash charges from its employee donation-matching program. Adjusted Operating Income, its own non-GAAP measure, rose to $2.5 billion from $2.2 billion, while Adjusted Operating Margin fell to 15% from 19%. The net loss was $23.3 billion, against $66.3 billion in the second quarter, again mostly fair-value changes on convertible notes and similar instruments. For the nine months, revenue was $33.2 billion and the net loss $104.0 billion.

Bigger commitments, and a new risk about who funds the capacity#

The amended filing puts a number on the commitments the original left blank: about $895.4 billion of purchase commitments and leases, "substantially all of which is related to compute and infrastructure." About $447.5 billion is expected before the end of 2030 and the rest mostly between 2031 and 2045, with about $69.8 billion due in the 12 months after September 30.

It also adds a risk factor: "certain of our compute providers and infrastructure partners depend on third-party financing or credit support to acquire chips and develop capacity, and if such financing or support becomes unavailable or more costly, contracted capacity may be delayed, repriced, reduced, or not delivered." Reuters reported that Anthropic will begin formally marketing shares next week, and that some current and prospective investors are weighing a valuation of $1.5 trillion, down from roughly $2 trillion. The amended filing still leaves the price range and share count blank.

Limits of the November 3 update#

• The 58% and 48% shares of revenue are our calculations from the quarterly table; Anthropic does not present them as ratios for these quarters.
• We read the amended S-1 on EDGAR. The marketing timetable and the valuation discussion come from Reuters' sources and are not in the filing.
• The filing does not say how much short-term compute it expects to buy, or for how long.

Updated October 28, 2026: Added the gross margin implied by the S-1's cost-of-revenue figures and the quarterly fall in compute costs as a share of revenue. The October 27 report follows unchanged.

October 28: The margin the S-1 implies but does not state#

The S-1 does not use the term "gross margin." Anthropic says that from 2025 it presents operating expenses by nature, so cost of revenue and gross profit "are no longer presented as separate line items." Its Note 8 still discloses cost of revenue as supplemental information: $2,380 million in the first half of 2026 against revenue of $16,286 million, and $1,019 million against $1,163 million in the first half of 2025. On those figures, by our arithmetic, the gross margin was about 85% in the first half of 2026, up from about 12% a year earlier, and about 40% for 2025 as a whole ($2,773 million on $4,585 million).

The filing says that substantially all of cost of revenue is compute and infrastructure costs for customer-serving workloads. Venture capitalist Tomasz Tunguz made the same calculation from Note 8 on his blog, (16,286 − 2,380) / 16,286, and labelled the results "my calculations, not disclosed figures."

A broader measure moved in the same direction. Total compute and infrastructure expenses, which the filing says cover research, model development, serving customers and internal use of Claude, were $8,945 million in the first half of 2026, or 55% of revenue, against $2,334 million, or 201%, a year earlier. In the quarterly table, they rose from $944 million in the first quarter of 2025 to $5.6 billion in the second quarter of 2026, and the filing says that as a share of revenue they "decreased from 251% to 48% over the same period, as revenue growth outpaced the growth of our committed compute cost base."

None of this changes the bottom line reported below: the first-half net loss was $80.7 billion, most of it fair-value changes, the operating loss under GAAP was $693 million, and the compute commitments covered in our separate report still stand.

Limits of the October 28 update#

• The 85%, 12% and 40% gross margins are computed from Note 8's cost-of-revenue figures; Anthropic does not report a gross margin in the S-1.
• Cost of revenue as Anthropic defines it covers mainly customer-serving compute, plus some personnel and overhead costs; compute for research and model development sits in the broader compute and infrastructure line.
• We did not read the Financial Times' or The Information's analyses of the margin, which are paywalled; the figures here are checked against the S-1 itself.

Anthropic's public filing puts the company's own name on the figures the WSJ reported from a confidential draft on October 20, and leaves blank the two numbers investors most want: the price and the number of shares. Anthropic said on Monday, October 26, that it had filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the SEC for an initial public offering of its Class A common stock, which it intends to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol "ANT." The number of shares and the price range have not been determined, Anthropic said. We reported the draft's figures earlier as relayed from the WSJ; they now appear in the filing itself.

What the S-1 says about revenue and losses#

The S-1 reports revenue of $16.3 billion for the six months ended June 30, 2026, up from $1.2 billion in the same period of 2025. For full years, it lists revenue of $41 million in 2023, $386 million in 2024 and $4.6 billion in 2025. The operating loss was $693 million in the first half, down from $2.1 billion a year earlier.

The net loss was $80.7 billion for the half, after $42.0 billion for 2025. Of the first-half figure, $72.4 billion is change in the fair value of convertible notes, derivatives and SAFEs (simple agreements for future equity). The filing says those changes were primarily driven by a rise in the fair value of the convertible notes as Anthropic's enterprise valuation increased.

Anthropic also reports Adjusted Operating Income of $1.6 billion for the half, against an Adjusted Operating Loss of $1.8 billion a year earlier. That is a non-GAAP measure that Anthropic defines and reconciles in the filing. Operating activities provided $3.9 billion of cash in the half, against $1.5 billion used a year earlier.

Cash, customers and headcount#

As of June 30, 2026, Anthropic held $112.4 billion in cash and cash equivalents and $19.3 billion in short-term investments, and says it had raised $141.1 billion of capital in total. As of September 30, 2026, it counts more than 11,900 customers with $100,000 or more of trailing-twelve-month revenue, more than 1,900 above $1 million and approximately 250 above $10 million. It had approximately 5,300 employees on that date.

No single customer accounted for more than 10% of revenue in the nine months ended September 30, 2026, the filing says, and its top five customers represented approximately 25%.

What the filing leaves blank, and what comes from sources instead#

The filed document leaves blank the share count, the price range and the revenue figure for the three months ended September 30, 2026. The amounts in its contractual-obligations table are blank too. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are the representatives of the underwriters.

The IPO date and size come from the Wall Street Journal, not from the filing. Citing people familiar with the matter, the WSJ reported that Anthropic is aiming to go public in the week of November 16, though the timing could change, and that the IPO could raise as much as $100 billion or more at a valuation of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion. Anthropic has not confirmed those figures. The valuation range matches the roughly $1.5 trillion some investors were discussing in mid-October, according to Reuters' sources at the time.

The filing also covers more than the headline numbers. We cover its compute commitments, founder voting control and the Long-Term Benefit Trust, safety disclosures and the Broadcom financing in separate reports.

Limits#

• We read the S-1 as filed on SEC EDGAR (accession 0001628280-26-067168) on October 27. Figures are quoted as the filing states them; blanks in this version may be completed in a later amendment.
• The IPO week, raise size and valuation range come from the WSJ's unnamed sources, which we read through BusinessDesk's syndicated copy of the WSJ article. Anthropic has not confirmed them, and the S-1 contains no date or price.
• Reuters' sources said on October 22 that marketing to investors would begin the week of November 9; the WSJ's sources put the listing in the week of November 16. The two timetables can both hold, and neither is confirmed by Anthropic.
• Adjusted Operating Income is Anthropic's own non-GAAP measure, and the customer and employee counts are Anthropic's own figures. We did not check them independently.

Sources#

• Investing.com: Anthropic targets next-week IPO despite AI market volatility, WSJ reports (November 9, 2026)
• TechCrunch: Anthropic reportedly plans to move forward with IPO plans (November 9, 2026)
• SEC EDGAR: Anthropic, PBC Form S-1/A, Amendment No. 1 (November 2, 2026)
• CNBC: Anthropic reports $17 billion in Q3 revenue, purchase commitments of $895.4 billion in revised S-1 (November 2, 2026)
• Reuters via Investing.com: Anthropic revenue growth slows, compute financing risks mount ahead of IPO (November 2, 2026)
• Anthropic: Anthropic files S-1 with the SEC for proposed initial public offering (October 26, 2026)
• SEC EDGAR: Anthropic, PBC Form S-1 (October 26, 2026)
• The Wall Street Journal via BusinessDesk: Anthropic unveils paperwork for blockbuster IPO (October 26, 2026)
• Reuters via CNA: Analysis: Anthropic IPO stands alone as AI market jitters sideline others (October 22, 2026)
• Tomasz Tunguz: Anthropic S-1 Analysis: How 7 Key Metrics Stack Up (October 26, 2026)
• Times of AI: Anthropic public S-1 update, formerly the draft-S-1 report (updated October 27, 2026)
• Times of AI: Anthropic IPO valuation talk (October 16, 2026)