How to research Anthropic's IPO filing with Clarifo

Anthropic made its registration statement public on October 26, 2026. The Form S-1 holds three years of audited financial statements, an unaudited first half of 2026 and dozens of notes. The most telling details are rarely on the first pages: they sit in the risk factors, the equity note and the fair-value tables.

We have indexed the whole filing, so you can ask it questions. Below we use it to answer three that an investor would ask, show where each answer comes from, and compare Anthropic with a company that is already listed. You can ask the same questions on Clarifo, in Claude or in ChatGPT.

1. How much restricted stock unit expense is still to come?

Anthropic pays part of its employees' compensation in restricted stock units (RSUs). For a company that has not yet listed, the timing of the expense matters as much as the amount. We asked how it will be recorded.

The answer comes from one paragraph on page 64 of the S-1. The RSUs vest when two conditions are met: a service condition, which is satisfied over four years for most of the awards, and a performance condition, which is satisfied when the registration statement becomes effective. No expense had been recorded for these RSUs at June 30, 2026, because that event was not yet probable.

Once the offering is completed, recording begins. Had the offering been completed on June 30, 2026, Anthropic would have recorded $2.9 billion of cumulative expense on that date, and a further $23.7 billion would be recognized over a weighted-average period of about 2.1 years. Together that is $26.6 billion. The S-1 adds that Anthropic had another $3.1 billion of unrecognized expense on other equity awards, expected to be recognized over about 1.3 years.

2. Why was the net loss $80.7 billion?

The headline loss is the number most people will quote, and on its own it says little about the business. Anthropic's operating loss for the first half of 2026 was $0.7 billion. The difference sits in a line most readers skip.

Anthropic funded much of its growth with convertible notes that turn into shares. As its valuation rose, the notes became worth more, and accounting records that increase as an expense: $72.4 billion in the first half of 2026. The S-1 says the change was primarily driven by an increase in enterprise valuation. These charges move no cash. Over the same period the business generated $3.9 billion of cash from operations.

3. How does it compare with a listed company?

A filing this long is hard to compare by hand: the same item has a different name, sits in a different note and covers a different period in every company's report. With Clarifo the comparison is one question, and each figure keeps its own source. Here we compare stock-based compensation as a share of revenue with Palantir, a US software company with a calendar fiscal year.

Anthropic's stock-based compensation was about a quarter of its 2025 revenue, almost ten percentage points above Palantir's. In the first half of 2026 the ratio fell to 13.4% ($2.2 billion on $16.3 billion of revenue), because revenue grew faster than the expense.

Other details worth asking about

• Voting control. A Founder LLC of the seven co-founders will hold Class F stock carrying 50.1% of the voting power.
• Lock-up. Existing shares are released in stages under 180-day and 365-day lock-ups, not all at once.
• Revenue mix. 80.2% of first-half 2026 revenue was consumption-based, and about 48% was sold through cloud provider marketplaces.
• Public Benefit Fund. 5% of fully diluted shares went to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund.

Three ways to ask