© Jason Henry for The New York Times
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In the next few weeks, public investors will get their chance to buy a piece of Anthropic.
But regular investors will never have a chance to steer the AI giant's decisions: Even though Anthropic is going public, it will essentially remain a private company, controlled by a handful of people with outsized power.
That's not unusual for giant tech companies launched in the past few decades (Larry Page and Sergey Brin have effective control of Google; Mark Zuckerberg has the same at Meta, as does Elon Musk at SpaceX.) It's also something you see at some prominent media companies (Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan have effective control of his two public companies; Larry and David Ellison have the same at Skydance.)
Anthropic's twist on the idea is that control is split between two different groups of insiders. There's a clique of seven founders, including CEO Dario Amodei and his sister, Daniela, who control 50.1% of shareholder voting power. And there's also a trust with the power to appoint four of the company's seven directors.
Put those two together, and you get a corporate constitution designed to keep public investors outside the real decisions. The founders control the outcome of any shareholder vote; the trust controls the board.
In theory, those two groups could end up in conflict on major issues. The trust-appointed directors might, say, vote to replace Amodei with a new CEO. Or the founder group could veto a sale approved by the board.
In reality, there's a lot of overlap between the two groups. For starters, Anthropic created and funds the trust. And Anthropic itself says it has made sure the trust is staffed with people who see the world the same way its executives do: "In practice to date, the Trustees and company executives have collaborated closely on sourcing, interviewing, and selecting Trustees," the company notes in its S-1 filing.
The main takeaway is that there's no way for an individual shareholder, or even institutional shareholders who own significant chunks of Anthropic's equity, to force it to move one way or another.
The upside of arrangements like this are pretty clear, from a founder's perspective: They insulate their founders and managers from investors who might only care about short-term goals.
The downside: These structures insulate founders and managers from investors who might have very good reasons to want the company to change.
A good counter-example to the trend is Twitter, which went public in 2013 without founder control — which is why Elon Musk was able to buy it nearly a decade later.
In Anthropic's case, that aversion to giving public investors a real voice is synced directly to the company's founding thesis — that the AI it is developing is so consequential and potentially dangerous, that it must be controlled by people who care about more than Anthropic's share price.
And for many investors clamoring to get in on Anthropic's IPO, that lack of control — disclosed up front — won't matter. They just want their shares to be worth more over time. Musk's ironclad control of SpaceX didn't put dampen demand for the biggest IPO in history.
But if investors ever want to force Anthropic to do something the Amodeis and their cofounders — or the Anthropic-created trust — don't want it to do, they'll be out of luck. Buyer beware.
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Anthropic is ready to IPO. Analysts and onlookers are weighing in.
On Monday, the AI lab filed its hotly anticipated S-1 paperwork. The prospectus offered an inside look at Anthropic's financials: a net loss of about $42 billion in 2025 and revenue of $4.6 billion. It plans to trade under the ticker symbol ANT.
The S-1 sets the stage for a blockbuster IPO. Here's what smart people are saying about Anthropic's filing:
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Venture capitalist Sarah Guo opened her X post with a big "CONGRATS" to Anthropic on the S-1 filing.
Guo shared her first takeaways: the inflection in operating profit, the focus on novel discovery, the mismatch between consumption-based revenue and long-term compute obligations, and more.
"I am curious to see how 1) a company with strong mission changes - or doesn't - how it operates under quarterly public inspection and 2) how public opinion may change when retail owns a piece of the upside," Guo wrote.
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Gary Marcus, one of the AI industry's most outspoken critics, wrote on X that Anthropic provided financial statements through June 30 — but omitted a full Q3 update.
He predicted that the company's economics had not improved, and alleged that Anthropic was "trying to skirt the truth."
Earlier this month, Business Insider reported that Anthropic told investors it generated $16.8 billion in third-quarter revenue, up 45% from the prior quarter.
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Ann Bordetsky was a partner at New Enterprise Associates' technology practice before founding her own firm, Elora Capital. She wrote on X that the S-1 was a "juicy read."
The filing will set "a (high) bar for how capital markets evaluate AI startups," Bordetsky wrote.
In a note sent to Business Insider, Harrison Rolfes said Anthropic's filing shows just how fast the company is growing — and just how expensive that growth is.
His main positive highlight: the $11.6 billion in revenue in the second quarter. His big worries: the $321.4 billion in future lease payments that haven't begun yet, and the $265.6 billion in fixed minimum purchase commitments.
"The compute commitments are enormous, and the suppliers are also lenders," Rolfes wrote, pointing to financing arrangements with Google, Amazon, and Broadcom. "The price range, Q3 revenue and the total compute commitment are still blank, so the next amendment should fill in a lot."
Finally, Rolfes said it's important for investors to note that Anthropic's founders retain outsize voting power. Put plainly, "public shareholders won't control the company," he wrote.
Sam Ro, a financial journalist and former Business Insider reporter, wrote in his Substack that Anthropic's longwinded AI risk section shouldn't make investors fret.
If AI really does create an existential catastrophe, he wrote, "having money might not be your biggest concern."
He also said it's anybody's guess whether Anthropic's stock price will rise or fall after it opens on the market.
The company hasn't been consistently profitable, he said, but "a company's valuation depends less on what it earned (or lost) in the past and more on what it's expected to earn in the years to come."
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On X, Gavin Baker wrote that Anthropic's annual recurring revenue has "likely gone vertical," even after the company cut prices on its AI tokens.
"I am shocked, absolutely shocked," he wrote. "$100b plus in year-end ARR looks possible again."
Jacob Bourne, an analyst at EMARKETER, a sister company to Business Insider, wrote in an email that Anthropic's filing comes as investors are increasingly wary of debt-fueled AI infrastructure projects.
"Anthropic's decision to press ahead is particularly noteworthy given its own warnings about AI risks, signaling a willingness to face heightened public scrutiny," he wrote.
Bourne also said the S-1 comes as the cost of developing frontier models remains "eye-watering." It's all evidence that companies are turning to public markets for fresh investments "to remain at the cutting edge of AI development," he wrote.
SemiAnalysis, the research firm founded by Dylan Patel, posted the "most mind blowing stat" it had seen in the S-1. It cited Anthropic's raised capital, compared to its cash and investments.
Anthropic is "growing at a rapid pace" and "profitable on an operating income basis as of the June quarter," SemiAnalysis wrote.
"This is likely the most efficient scaling of a business in the history of capitalism," the firm wrote.
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Brad Gerstner heaped his praise on Anthropic. He congratulated the team on "another important milestone!"
Altimeter will partner with Anthropic through "major participation in the IPO on top of our existing ownership," Gerstner wrote. He used an American flag and a rocket emoji.
Gerstner's venture capital firm is a longtime investor in Anthropic, co-leading the AI lab's Series H in May.
During an interview on CNBC, Matt Murphy, one of Anthropic's earliest investors, said he's increasingly bullish on the AI lab.
"You wait your entire 25-year career to find a technology wave like this," he said. "To be able to have invested in the leader early is just phenomenal."
Vivek Gopalan is an investor at 8VC, the venture capital firm cofounded by Joe Lonsdale. He posted a graph from Anthropic's S-1 showing rising revenue per dollar of compute.
"You need to believe that this is monotonic and increasing," Gopalan wrote.
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Dan Shipper had "big news" to share: a joke about Anthropic's ever-present safety focus. He celebrated that the S-1 "doesn't say 'or it might kill / unemploy everyone' in the first paragraph!"
The CEO of Every, an AI agent startup, called it a "win for humanity."
Dadisi Olutosin said on LinkedIn on Monday that Anthropic’s IPO filing raised a question for potential investors: “When does an extraordinary company become an overpriced investment?”
Olutosin wrote that at a reported valuation of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion, buyers would pay about 101 times the company’s trailing revenue, compared with roughly 20.5 times the revenue pace at which Series H investors bought in.
“Innovation can transform an industry,” Olutosin said. “That doesn’t make every entry price attractive.”
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Sinan Aral said Anthropic’s potential valuation could make it one of the world’s most valuable companies, but that its infrastructure commitments also pose a “tremendous economic risk.”
Aral told CNBC's "Squawk Box" show on Monday that he has questions about what the AI lab’s margins and profitability would look like as it spends hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure. Aral also said there are many risks described in the company’s S-1, including the possibility that its products could act on their own.
“The question is, where is the enduring value?” Aral said. “And I think the enduring value is going to come from companies that can demonstrate enterprise profitability, productivity, and actual value add rather than just providing intelligence.”
Nick Moran wrote on LinkedIn said Anthropic’s $80.7 billion loss in the first half of 2026 was largely an accounting story.
“Anthropic lost $80 billion on paper mostly because it became more valuable,” he wrote.
Moran said the bigger question for investors is the price they’ll pay. While Anthropic’s revenue growth remained “spectacular,” Moran wrote, it slowed from the second quarter to the third as the company sought a higher valuation.
“The loss is an accounting story. The multiple is the real one,” Moran wrote. "Institutional and retail demand is real. I wouldn't be surprised to see it end up on the higher end of the range."
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Brian Sozzi wrote on LinkedIn that he has three takeaways from Anthropic’s IPO prospectus: the banks leading the offering, the AI lab’s adjusted profits, and its warning about risks to humanity.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are the lead underwriters and “will be cleaning up here on fees,” Sozzi wrote on LinkedIn, adding that Anthropic was profitable on an adjusted operating and net basis in the first six months of the year.
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Venture capitalist and "All-In" podcast host Chamath Palihapitiya praised Anthropic in a brief X post after the S-1 dropped.
"Ant is an amazing business…," Palihapitiya wrote in a Monday noon X post.
The VC has previously been critical about Anthropic, advising consulting firms not to deploy Anthropic and OpenAI's products.
"If you are running a consulting business and you are deploying Anthropic or OpenAI directly into your organization (I'm looking at you PwC and Accenture) you are letting the fox into the hen house," Palihapitiya wrote on X in May.
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Anish Acharya, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said his earlier predictions about Anthropic's financials have largely held true, calling it a gross-margin-positive profile and "obviously a tremendous business."
Acharya's post on Monday was a repost of a September post, in which he laid out some predictions for Anthropic.
He said in the earlier post, "Overall I think the market underweights how sophisticated anthropic has been in aligning its business interests with its technical and mission interests."
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Aaron Levie, the CEO of enterprise cloud company Box, said the industry is still in the early stages of AI adoption, as most companies have not started using AI agents in full force.
As deploying agents increases token consumption, the average Fortune 500 customer's spending on Anthropic products could rise, he said in a Monday X post.
"This S-1 gives you a sense of both the strength of the frontier lab business model - even amidst massive competition - and how early we are in the build out of AI," Levie wrote.
© Jason Henry for The New York Times
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