Model Labs

On 26 October 2026 Anthropic filed a public registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for a listing of Class A shares on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker ANT. The price range, the number of shares, the size of the offering and the listing date were blank, as is usual at a first public filing. Goldman Sachs was reported as lead left bookrunner, with Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Citigroup, Barclays, Wells Fargo and Bank of America (reported). Anthropic's last private round, $65 billion in May 2026, had valued it at $965 billion.

For the first time, a frontier lab that did not belong to a larger company showed its accounts. The figures below come from coverage of the S-1 and remain to be checked against the filing itself. Revenue was about $4.585 billion in 2025 and about $16.286 billion in the first half of 2026 alone, against about $1.16 billion in the first half of 2025. The operating loss for the first half of 2026 was about $693 million, and the second quarter showed operating income of about $974 million. The net loss for the same half was about $80.7 billion, of which about $72.4 billion was a non-cash change in the fair value of convertible notes, derivatives and SAFEs as Anthropic's own valuation rose. Cash and short-term investments were about $131.7 billion at 30 June 2026. Its compute obligations came in two parts: about $265.6 billion of fixed or minimum purchase commitments and about $321.4 billion of leases that had not yet commenced at 30 June 2026, with named counterparties' maximums reaching about $657 billion. A widely quoted total of about $518 billion does not appear in the filing. Five customers made up about a quarter of revenue, none more than 10%.

A company that had grown revenue about fourteen-fold in a year, reached operating break-even in one quarter, and signed compute commitments and leases worth more than a hundred times its 2023 valuation (about $4.1 billion, reported) is not a software company. This chapter explains what kind of business a model lab is, and compares the two independent labs that reached the frontier, OpenAI and Anthropic.