Anthropic Tightens Founder Control and Nears Record-Breaking IPO as Revenue Curve Steepens

Anthropic restructures governance with founder-friendly shares, posts $11.5B Q2 revenue, and eyes a $2T Nasdaq IPO as early as October.

The countdown to what could be the largest technology listing in recent memory is accelerating, with Anthropic reshaping its governance architecture just weeks before it is expected to file with US regulators. The AI developer, which Bloomberg reports will submit its IPO paperwork to the SEC as early as late August, is moving to cement founder influence through a multi-class share structure — a mechanism designed to insulate management from external shareholder pressure from day one.

A Slimmer Trust, A Stronger Founder Hand

The governance overhaul centers on co-founder Dario Amodei, who according to The Information, Bloomberg, and Reuters holds only about two percent of the company but is slated to receive shares with enhanced voting rights. The arrangement would grant Amodei and other founding members outsized influence over strategic decisions, a model familiar from other tech giants' public debuts but one that Anthropic is communicating with unusual explicitness and speed.

The tightening extends to the company's oversight apparatus. The Long-Term Benefit Trust, which monitors ethical and safety-related questions, will now comprise just three trustees: Neil Buddy Shah, Richard Fontaine, and Ben Bernanke. The reduction follows Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar's departure from the trust in early August to join Anthropic as Chief Global Affairs Officer.

For investors eyeing an October listing on the Nasdaq — with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase reportedly leading the syndicate, though that timeline remains unconfirmed — these structural details carry real weight. The Financial Times reports that investors are pricing the company at $2 trillion or more, making the question of who actually controls strategic decisions a central valuation consideration.

Revenue Momentum That Reshaped the Competitive Landscape

The governance moves arrive alongside financial results that have fundamentally altered the AI sector's pecking order. Anthropic's preliminary second-quarter 2026 revenue topped $11.5 billion, a more than fourteen-fold jump from the $787 million recorded in the year-ago quarter and well above the $4.73 billion posted in Q1 2026. According to the Wall Street Journal, that performance put Anthropic ahead of OpenAI's $6.7 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time.

The company also achieved its first positive adjusted operating result in the second quarter — a milestone OpenAI could not match, having posted an operating loss of $12.3 billion over the same period. The combination of explosive growth and emerging profitability appears to be resonating beyond Anthropic's own valuation: media reports suggest the Monday announcement of the run-rate and quarterly figures even nudged semiconductor stocks up one percent, as investors bet on rising demand for AI infrastructure.

The annualized revenue run-rate reached more than $65 billion by the end of July, up from $47 billion in May and roughly $9 billion at the close of 2025. For the full year 2026, investors are projecting revenues between $100 billion and $120 billion.

Secondary Markets Price the Future

The anticipation surrounding the listing has already pushed valuations higher in secondary markets. Anthropic shares changed hands there at a $1.5 trillion valuation a week ago — a 25 percent gain within a single month and a substantial premium over the company's most recent official Series H round, which valued it at $965 billion.

The issuance itself could match or exceed the record set by SpaceX, according to Bloomberg. Should the offering proceed at the upper end of expectations, it would mark a defining moment for the AI sector's public-market era.

Acquisitions, Infrastructure, and a New Enterprise Unit

The growth trajectory is mirrored in Anthropic's investment activity. Bloomberg reported on August 13 that the company is in talks to acquire Decart AI for roughly $6 billion — its largest known acquisition to date. Decart develops software that improves chip utilization, making AI model training and operation more efficient. The deal remains unconsummated and could still collapse.

On the compute front, Anthropic has locked in a 20-year agreement with Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms for 191 megawatts at its Rockdale, Texas facility. The contract is valued at $9.1 billion, according to Riot's disclosures and reports from Bloomberg and CNBC, with the potential to reach $16.1 billion if two additional five-year extensions are exercised.

The company has also been building out its enterprise-facing capabilities. On Thursday, it launched "Ode," a standalone unit developed with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, GIC, and Sequoia, designed to guide companies through AI transformation using Claude. Ode simultaneously acquired the AI services firm Casper Studios to integrate tailored Claude implementations into existing corporate workflows.

Infrastructure partnerships have multiplied as well: a platform called "Theseus Infrastructure" emerged earlier this month with Macquarie Asset Management and GIC to develop large-scale data center capacity, while a Wednesday agreement with UK startup Fractile covers the purchase of roughly $250 million in AI inference chips, with options for future contract expansions.

Product Evolution and Cautious Risk Language

Anthropic has also upgraded Claude Code into a persistently active, event-driven agent system capable of managing long-running software development tasks across devices. To address enterprise client concerns, the company plans to revise its data storage policies — in June it had introduced a rule allowing marked prompts to be stored for up to two years.

Not all recent developments point toward acceleration. Axios reports that Anthropic is holding back the release of an internal, apparently more capable successor model dubbed "Model 2," without slowing overall development. The company has also revised its internal risk assessment for misalignment in critical situations from "very low" to "low," citing recent cybersecurity incidents. The company's credit line is expected to expand beyond $10 billion before the listing to fund growing compute demands.

For prospective investors, that revised risk language — alongside the governance structure and the sheer scale of the revenue ramp — will likely remain a focal point as the October listing window approaches.