October 27: Artificial Intelligence Comes to Wall Street

The company behind Claude has filed to go public, setting up what could be one of the largest stock market debuts on record.

On Monday, October 26, Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company that makes the Claude family of AI models, filed publicly with the Securities and Exchange Commission to sell shares on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol ANT. The filing gave the public its first detailed look at one of the fastest-growing companies in business history. It also started the countdown to an IPO that some reports say could value the company at up to $2 trillion, a figure the filing itself does not confirm.

Opening the Books

The numbers are striking. Anthropic reported $16.3 billion in revenue for the first six months of 2026, up from $1.16 billion a year earlier, roughly fourteen times as much in a single year. In the second quarter alone, revenue grew 1,368% from the year before, and the company recorded its first operating profit, $974 million. The filing also showed an $80.7 billion net loss for the first half, but nearly all of it came from a $72.4 billion non-cash accounting charge, not day-to-day spending. Anthropic reported $131.7 billion in cash and investments, along with long-term commitments of roughly $417 billion for data centers and computing power. The share price and number of shares have not been set yet. The Wall Street Journal reported that the company is aiming to go public the week of November 16, though that could change.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI researchers, including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, and was organized as a public benefit corporation, a legal structure that commits it to a public mission alongside profit. That mission shows up in the filing. Its seven co-founders will hold 50.1% of the voting power through a single special share, and the company has set aside about 847 million shares in a subsidiary created to advance its public-benefit purpose. The filing warns that this structure will limit public shareholders’ ability to influence major decisions. It also puts Anthropic ahead of its rival OpenAI in the race to go public. Just five months ago, private investors valued the company at $965 billion.

A grand stock exchange trading floor at dawn, with glowing streams of light flowing from data servers into the hall

Every major technological era eventually arrives on Wall Street, and artificial intelligence has now filed its paperwork.

Some IPOs mark the start of an era. Netscape’s 1995 debut is often remembered as the opening of the internet boom. Google’s 2004 offering and Facebook’s in 2012 marked the rise of search and social media. Saudi Aramco’s 2019 listing still holds the record for the most money raised in an IPO. Whether Anthropic breaks that record will depend on details it has not yet announced. Either way, the filing shows how quickly a technology most people had never used a few years ago has become one of the biggest businesses in the world.