Anthropic’s IPO filing highlights revenue gap with Chinese AI rivals

Anthropic has filed its S-1 with the SEC. The numbers inside are making investors in Hong Kong do some uncomfortable math.

The Claude maker reported $16.3 billion in revenue for the first half of 2026. That is up more than 1,300% year over year, according to the filing. It also gives Chinese AI labs both a reason for hope and a sense of how far behind they are.

What the S-1 actually says

Anthropic submitted its prospectus on October 26, 2026. It plans to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. The offering is expected in mid-November and could set a record.

The pricing talk is enormous. The IPO could value Anthropic at somewhere between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion.

Most of the momentum came late in the half. Second-quarter revenue alone hit $11.6 billion. That quarter also produced the company’s first quarterly operating profit, at $974 million.

The full first half was messier. Anthropic posted an operating loss of $693 million for the six months. On an adjusted basis, operating income came in at $1.62 billion.

The figure that will grab headlines is the net loss: $80.7 billion. Before anyone panics, the filing attributes most of it to non-cash accounting charges tied to convertible notes.

The view from Hong Kong

Reuters Breakingviews framed the filing through the lens of China’s listed AI labs, Z.AI and MiniMax. Its argument: Anthropic’s results prove that spending heavily on frontier models can pay off.

But the comparison gets rough quickly. Breakingviews noted that the Chinese duo’s sales trail Anthropic’s by only about two years each. It cautioned, however, that the real gap may be much larger.

The research figures show why. Z.AI and MiniMax together generated revenue roughly 1/63rd of Anthropic’s first-half haul. Z.AI’s annualized first-half revenue stood at approximately $284 million.

That figure puts Z.AI closer to where Anthropic’s revenue was projected to be in 2024.

The costs hiding behind the growth

Anthropic’s filing is not a victory lap, either. The S-1 details substantial compute commitments, including billions owed to cloud providers Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

The filing also flags regulatory risk around advanced AI and concerns about potential misuse.

What this means for investors and rivals

For public market investors, the Anthropic IPO is shaping up as a referendum on AI monetization. The pitch is simple: frontier AI is no longer just a cost center, and the second quarter proves it.

The counterargument lives in the compute commitments and the adjusted figures. Investors will need to decide how much weight to give the $1.62 billion adjusted operating income versus the $693 million reported operating loss. At a valuation of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion, the market is pricing in a lot of future quarters that look like Q2, not Q1.