Anthropic files for IPO as revenue surges past $17 billion

For some reason, I feel really weird anytime Anthropic inserts beautiful paintings into their articles/promos. They've used one of John Frederick Kensett's works here, for example (the one with a river and a dotted line on top of it)

To me, this technology and these AI companies, in their current form, are as far away from the 19th century landscape paintings as they could get. As if they're trying to leech off them and fix their branding/message. Doesn't seem fair for some reason

Edit: Painting identification, my bad

There is a lot of value from LLMs but it is something that I can switch easily. Yes, some frontier models are much better but users can still chose to use cheaper models for most of the work. In fact most applications, through which people will interact with LLMs anyway, will not need frontier models unless they offer "chat with AI". Anything that solves specific problems (even multiple problems) does not need frontier LLMs.

Anthropic and OpenAI will have to become more of the end user application stack. Files, calendars, emails, photos, and much more have to pass through them for them to keep making money. Else they cannot make money like the way they have been in this early era of LLMs.

I still think they are on a tight timer. Local models are already extremely good - good enough for most normal users. They are going to continue to get better. Once hardware starts to become affordable again, we will see AI appliances that can do everything most users want, and privately.

A few important points from the linked documents:

1. Price range: $70–78 with midpoint at around $74.00

2. Gross deal size: $85.3B (IPO + $26B private placement)

3. Implied market cap: ~$968B (at $74, 13.09B shares)

4. Q3'26 revenue: $17.0B (+1,127% YoY)

5. Run-rate revenue: ~$81B (as of Oct 2026)

6. Compute commitments: $900.9B (through 2045)

7. Ticker: ANT (Nasdaq)

8. Customers with ≥$100K, ≥$1M and ≥$10M TTM revenue: 11,900+, 1,900+ and ~250.

9. Customers under $100K: ~40 million

10. Fortune 500 penetration: over 50%

11. Global 2000 penetration: over 30%

One interesting thing from their presentation (especially given recent events): They claim to have used Mythos to port Claude from running on nVIDIA GPUs to running on AMD GPUs in just 3 days, with basically no human intervention. If this is true, it significantly reduces nVIDIA's moat regarding GPU compute. https://youtu.be/eynv5VR9qos?t=1230

Does anyone not feel like there's something wrong with this? and that the thousands of Anthropic employees should not be able to make money off of this?

They looted all human knowledge, will displace jobs, they're disposable themselves, and no strong moat.

Why is such a company even allowed to be IPOd?

Series H could be underwater already if they only make the low end of the range. Is anyone else concerned?

Anthropic Valuation ($B, Basic)

-------------------------------------------

Ser E Mar '25 | # $61.5B

Ser F Sep '25 | ### $183.0B

Ser G Feb '26 | ####### $380.0B

Ser H May '26 | ################## $965.0B

IPO @$70 Low | ################# $916.3B

IPO @$74 Mid | ################## $968.7B

IPO @$78 High | ################### $1,021B

Correction: It was pointed out that I used the wrong figures for this. Actual series H profit is more like 19% at the low end.

Anthropic Valuation ($B, Fully Diluted)

--------------------------------------------

Ser E Mar '25 | # $61.5B

Ser F Sep '25 | ## $183.0B

Ser G Feb '26 | ##### $380.0B

Ser H May '26 | ############# $965.0B

IPO @$70 (+19%)| ################# $1,260B

IPO @$74 (+25%)| ################## $1,332B

IPO @$78 (+32%)| ###################$1,404B

There isn't a single company I've talked to that isn't trying to cut their AI development spend next year. My guess is they are trying to raise at peak for the storm to come.

All of these models capabilities discussions on each AI topic are so exhausting. It's IPO people, let's discuss some finance and economics.

This is second important IPO of the year. First one was SpaceX.

If we look into price and behaviour of that one we can conclude what is going to happen with Anthropic.

My guess is that until something really huge happens, another breakthrough or money goes dry, it will be something similar to SpaceX. Neither huge thing nor disaster. Employees and owners would profit the most and retail buyers would just see significant oscillations but nothing worth huge stress.

This one is also important for OpenAI potential IPO, because if it is not huge success maybe OpenAI won't go further.