Anthropic’s blockbuster filing for a Nasdaq listing has laid bare one of the most founder-controlled governance structures ever proposed for a public company of its size, with its seven co-founders retaining a fixed 50.1 per cent of every shareholder vote through a single special share. The artificial intelligence company filed its S-1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, October 26, to list Class A shares on Nasdaq under the ticker “ANT,” with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as lead managers. Market talk places a possible valuation between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion, with a debut targeted for mid-to-late November, according to multiple reports.
Explosive growth, giant paper losses
The prospectus shows revenue of about $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, up from $1.2 billion a year earlier, including $11.56 billion in the June quarter alone — up 1,368 per cent in a year — and the company’s first quarterly operating profit of $974 million. The headline net loss for the half of $80.7 billion is largely a paper charge: about $72.4 billion from revaluing convertible notes and SAFEs as the company’s own valuation climbed. Operating cash flow flipped to positive $3.93 billion. But the filing also discloses more than $500 billion in multi-year, largely non-cancellable compute and cloud commitments — roughly $114.5 billion to Google, $110 billion to Amazon, $44.9 billion to Microsoft and about $161.2 billion in Broadcom leases — plus explicit warnings about catastrophic AI risks and misuse, including internal tests showing dangerous model behaviours.
Amazon’s windfall
Amazon emerges as the biggest financial winner. The e-commerce and cloud giant holds a stake capped at 12 per cent, $6.2 billion of notes converting at $2.09 and $5.05 a share, and a long-term cloud contract, while Alphabet’s stake has been diluted to an estimated 5.6 per cent, according to PitchBook analysis. At a $2 trillion valuation, Amazon’s stake, approaching 20 per cent when convertible notes are counted, could be worth roughly $400 billion, analysts estimate. Both Amazon and Google hold non-voting shares, meaning the strategic partners have no say over corporate decisions despite their massive financial exposure. A Long-Term Benefit Trust elects a majority of the board, and the company will remain a public benefit corporation.
