• by Laurie Sullivan , June 1, 2026

Anthropic filed a draft registration statement on Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) today that in a way that protects the company’s privacy.

Although it is not entirely clear how its initial public offering (IPO) will affect advertisers and brands, it is clear that the company is not building an advertising network. It is building a software ecosystem that brands and agencies will use to replace traditional workflows.

"We're about to find out whsether the market thinks AI is a consumer story or an enterprise story," Emarketer AI analyst Nate Elliott wrote in a statement to MediaPost. "While Claude has built a solid enterprise user base, it's just not competitive as a consumer AI platform."

Emarketer forecasts that only 5.4% of U.S. internet users will use Claude in 2026 -- far behind the 36.6% who will use ChatGPT and the 27.4% who will use Gemini.

More than 60% of artificial intelligence (AI) users in the U.S. say they use these tools for work, and the analyst firm believes that percentage will only grow.

The latest financial disclosures reveal critical updates for advertisers, brands, and ad agencies. For example, the company's growth is mostly corporate-driven, completely separating it from consumer-advertising models.

More than 80% of Anthropic's total revenue comes directly from institutional enterprise clients, and more than 1,000 corporate clients now spend more than $1 million annually on Claude.

This ensures that Anthropic's post-IPO roadmap will cater entirely to premium enterprise-software workflows for companies' brands, rather than toward consumers to sell their products or ad networks, according to one report.

Anthropic's annualized revenue run-rate (ARR) has skyrocketed to $47 billion -- up from just $9 billion at the end of last year.

It is doubling its ARR roughly every six weeks -- a rate of growth that media companies have widely reported as "unprecedented" in B2B software history. 

The company has focused on ways to generate revenue other than advertising, so it has become less dependent on other companies.

Anthropic “expects a 130% revenue surge to $10.9 billion in the June quarter and its first operating profit, defying skeptics of the AI boom,” wrote The Wall Street Journal.

While the company has not yet determined the number of shares or price, a potential public offering could occur as early as late 2026.

The company disclosed the figures to investors as part of an ongoing funding round that is likely to push its valuation above OpenAI's.

The projections, which were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, provide a window into the meteoric rise of a startup that was once a laggard in the AI race, and defy the conventional wisdom that AI companies' huge spending needs negatively impact near-term profitability.

Anthropic is working to build out automated workflows, so company developers do not need to stop and correct mistakes. Instead, AI will do it for them, no matter what the task is.