Claude Maker Anthropic Files to Go Public, and Its Prospectus Admits the Pentagon Won on Appeal

Anthropic, the San Francisco company behind the Claude SI models, filed paperwork Monday to sell its stock to the public for the first time. It wants to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker "ANT." The registration statement, a Form S-1 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, is the first public look at its full books.

It is also something else: a signed filing in which Anthropic tells future shareholders that it lost its fight with the Pentagon on appeal. The company that refused to let the U.S. military use its models for "every lawful purpose" is now asking ordinary Americans to buy in, while its seven co-founders keep a locked-in majority of the vote.

The money

The growth is real. Anthropic booked $41 million in revenue in 2023, $386 million in 2024 and $4.6 billion in 2025. In just the first six months of 2026 it took in $16.3 billion, up from $1.2 billion a year earlier. The number of customers paying it $100,000 or more a year jumped from more than 950 to more than 11,900 in twelve months.

The losses are real too, but they need a translation. The headline everyone is running is an $80.7 billion net loss for January through June. Of that, $72.4 billion is a bookkeeping charge: Anthropic sold convertible notes to investors, its valuation soared, and accounting rules make it mark those notes up as a loss. That is not cash out the door.

Strip that out and the picture is far better, though not yet profitable. The company lost $693 million on operations in the first half, down from $2.1 billion a year earlier, and it turned a $1.0 billion operating profit in the April-to-June quarter alone. It had $112.4 billion in cash on June 30.

The Pentagon fight, in Anthropic's own words

The risk-factor section reads like a history of the company's fight with this administration. Anthropic had said publicly that its technology should not be used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. The Pentagon wanted a contract allowing all lawful uses. On Feb. 27, the filing says, President Trump directed every federal agency to stop using Anthropic's technology.

The same day, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth posted that Anthropic had "chosen duplicity" and tried "to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military." He ordered the company designated a "Supply-Chain Risk to National Security" and wrote: "America's warfighters will never be held hostage by the ideological whims of Big Tech. This decision is final."

Anthropic sued on March 9. CEO Dario Amodei said at the time that "we do not believe this action is legally sound, and we see no choice but to challenge it in court." The company won the first round. On Aug. 27, a federal judge in San Francisco largely granted it summary judgment, ruling the government's actions were retaliation for protected speech and that one designation, under 10 U.S.C. 3252, exceeded Hegseth's authority.

Then came the court that matters most for federal contracting. On Sept. 25, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled 2-1 that the Pentagon's second designation, under Section 4713 of the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act, was lawful. Judge Gregory Katsas wrote that Anthropic "encodes restrictions into Claude that prevent the model from performing tasks that Anthropic wishes to prevent," and that "on more than one occasion, these restrictions have stopped Claude from performing tasks requested by government users."

The court also said a dispute had arisen over whether Anthropic's contract terms "barred the use of Claude in an ongoing overseas military operation, leaving the Department uncertain whether Claude would perform as needed and intended." The First Amendment claim failed, Katsas wrote, because "the nub of this dispute was contractual." His bottom line: "in our Republic, it is the President and the Secretary of War who must determine how best to balance the competing risks." Judge Neomi Rao joined him. Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson dissented, arguing Congress "has taken great pains to define the type of 'supply chain risk'" the law covers.

In the S-1, Anthropic concedes the appeals court ruled "that the Department of War's Section 4713 supply-chain risk designation was proper, and that our rights under the First Amendment and Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment were not violated." It has asked the full D.C. Circuit to rehear the case. A note to its financial statements warns the company "may experience material revenue losses or business disruptions attributable to these events."

It is not the only run-in with Washington the filing discloses. In June, the Commerce Department slapped worldwide export restrictions on two of Anthropic's top models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The company switched both off for every customer until it "updated our safeguards" and Commerce lifted the limits. Separately, the filing says the Pentagon had "suggested it could invoke the Defense Production Act" to force Anthropic to drop its limits on weapons and surveillance uses. Just this weekend, the company confirmed one of its models pulled fee-gated vote counts from Georgia's election data hub, which we reported here.

Who runs it after the IPO

Buying a share of Anthropic will not buy much say. Just before the offering, the company will issue a single share of a special Class F stock to a "Founder LLC" made up of Dario Amodei, his sister and company president Daniela Amodei, and five other co-founders. That one share carries "an aggregate number of votes that equals 50.1% of the total voting power" on ordinary shareholder matters, no matter how many shares the public buys.

On top of that, a separate Long-Term Benefit Trust holds Class T stock that lets it elect a majority of the board. The filing says the trust and the Founder LLC "will have the ability to elect all members of our board of directors." Anthropic will be a "controlled company" under Nasdaq rules, which lets it skip some independence requirements. It is also a public benefit corporation, legally required to weigh its stated mission alongside shareholder returns.

The founders are not working for free, either. Dario and Daniela Amodei each received about $654,000 in salary in 2025, and total pay of about $18.0 million and $16.4 million, mostly in stock and options.

The compute bill

The filing also shows how much Anthropic has promised to spend on computing power. It has committed to spend at least $110 billion with Amazon between May 2026 and April 2036, "regardless of actual usage." It has agreed to spend up to $120.5 billion into 2029 with SpaceXAI, the former xAI, now a subsidiary of Elon Musk's SpaceX, roughly $3.1 billion a month once all the capacity arrives, which it expects in December. And it expects to spend more than $20 billion on AMD-based systems starting in 2027.

What happens next

The filing leaves the share price range and the number of shares blank. Those come in a later amendment, and no stock can be sold until the SEC declares the registration effective. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are listed as the contacts for the preliminary prospectus. The D.C. Circuit rehearing request is still pending.

The bottom line: Anthropic's sales grew more than thirteenfold in a year, and its books show a business that is starting to work. But the prospectus also puts in writing what the Pentagon said in February: a company that keeps its own veto over how the military may use its product is a risk the government does not have to accept. A federal appeals court agreed. Investors now get to decide what that is worth, knowing the seven people at the top will keep control either way.