Anthropic Just Filed to Go Public. Should You Buy the Stock?

Another mega-IPO will soon be here. Months after SpaceX's record-setting debut, Anthropic is set to list next month after its official public S-1 was filed on Monday, Oct. 26, 2026.

The filing finally gives us a real look under the hood of a company at the very heart of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. There's a lot there, including a more than 90-page section outlining the risks inherent in its line of business, as well as the most complete financial picture to date.

So, with what we know now, should you buy Anthropic stock when it finally lists?

How Anthropic makes money from Claude

Anthropic is a frontier lab behind the system of AI models dubbed Claude. Like its fierce competitor, OpenAI, the company makes money in two main ways. It sells subscriptions that provide a set level of access, and it also charges customers based on how much they use, measured in "tokens". The more they use Claude, the more tokens they use, and the more they pay.

That second model is typically how Anthropic's enterprise clients use their services.

Claude Code shows Anthropic's ambitions beyond chatbots

Anthropic's ambitions go well beyond selling a chatbot. The company sees a future where Claude is an essential part of the day-to-day workflows of the majority of "knowledge workers" across the globe -- think white-collar, screen-based jobs.

By far the clearest example of this playing out in the real world is Claude Code, the company's "vibe-coding" platform that can help plan, write, test, and debug software with an astonishing level of autonomy. The tool is now a mainstay across Silicon Valley and has been the key factor in the company's explosive growth.

Image source: Getty Images.

Anthropic is hoping a similar level of capability and utility will be found across industries and job titles.

Longer term, the company says its AI models could be used to accelerate drug discovery and scientific research and help to solve problems that have eluded humans for decades.

Anthropic's IPO filing details serious AI risks

At the same time, the company laid out some pretty serious risk factors that go just a bit further than the boilerplate risk factors laid out in a more typical S-1. Your more prosaic, business-oriented risks, like retaining talent and effectively deploying capital, are followed by more than 90 pages outlining risks ranging from the potential to "destabilize the geopolitical order" to its technology exceeding the ability of "humans to understand and control."

Revenue is soaring, but what about profits?

All that is interesting to be sure, but the financials are still the most important factor in considering Anthropic as an investment. The company is growing at an incredible pace -- a pace rarely seen at this scale. Revenue reached $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, about 14 times what it generated a year earlier in the same period and three and a half times its revenue for the whole of 2025.

But its top-line isn't really where most of the focus is right now. That's well-trod territory at this point. What's more interesting is what the company is spending. It recorded an $80.7 billion net loss over those six months, but this looks worse than it is in reality: it includes a non-operational, non-cash accounting charge of $72.4 billion. If you strip that out, the company's net loss comes in at $8.3 billion.

On an operating basis, its loss actually narrowed from $2.1 billion during the first half of 2025 to $693 million in the first half of 2026. The company also recorded an operating profit in Q2 of this year of $974 million.

That's an encouraging sign that revenue is beginning to catch up with the cost of developing and running Claude. Still, one profitable quarter doesn't establish that Anthropic can consistently make money, especially as it takes on more spending commitments to support its ambitions.

Why I'm passing on Anthropic's IPO

I'm going to pass on Anthropic's IPO. I could point to the valuation, but my bigger concern is whether Anthropic has a durable moat.

Claude doesn't need to lose its technological lead for the business to face serious pressure. Competing models only need to be good enough for the work customers actually need done. That's why I think AI is moving toward becoming a commodity. Anthropic could see demand keep growing while competition forces it to charge less and less, all the while it continues to spend heavily to develop its next model.

Johnny Rice has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.