In what is projected to be one of the largest IPOs in history, the AI giant, Anthropic, has taken the first step in holding an IPO, with AI in bio/pharmaceutical development a key component in its growth strategy.

By Patricia Van Arnum, Editorial Director, DCAT, [email protected]

Behind Anthropic’s IPO
Setting the stage for what is projected to be one of the largest initial public offerings (IPOs) in history, the AI research and technology company, Anthropic, announced this week (October 26, 2026) that it has filed an initial registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for a proposed IPO of its Class A common stock. The company says it plans to list its stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market. The number of shares of common stock to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by team of researchers that included co-founder and now Chief Executive Officer, Dario Amodei, and co-founder and now President, Daniela Amodei, both former executives of OpenAI, a chief competitor and the company behind ChatGPT, a generative AI chatbot. Before co-founding Anthropic, Dario Amodei served as Vice President of Research at OpenAI, where he led the development of large language models such as GPT-2 and GPT-3. Prior to OpenAI, he was a Senior Research Scientist at Google Brain, a deep learning and AI research unit, which was subsequently merged with DeepMind, a London AI startup in 2023, to form  Google DeepMind, now the AI research unit and subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Daniela Amodei served as Vice President of Safety and Policy at OpenAI, where she led efforts to ensure the safe development and deployment of AI systems. Prior to her work in the AI industry, she was Head of Risk Operations at Stripe, a financial technology company, where she oversaw risk management and compliance.

The ascent of Anthropic is led by it Claude, a generative AI chatbot and family of large language models and the company’s first commercial product that was launched in 2023. Anthropic has four Claude model classes: Mythos (including Fable), Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku, each optimized for a different point on the capability-cost-speed curve and which can be used individually for certain tasks or in combination with one another. All models support text, code, and multimodal inputs. For the company, the model a customer uses and the volume of usage are the primary drivers of customer spend. The advancing intelligence and capabilities of each successive version of a Claude model drive the diffusion of Claude among customers, and as new customers adopt Claude and existing customers expand their usage into new workflows, the company has seen its revenues grow.

The rise of the company is evident in its first-half 2026 results, which saw an exponential increase in revenues. The company posted revenues of $16.3 billion for the six months ended June 30, 2026, up nearly 1,300% from the $1.2 billion in revenues posted for the six months ended June 30, 2025. Consumption-based and subscription-based revenue increased by $12.1 billion and $3.0 billion, respectively, for the six months ended June 30, 2026, compared to the prior-year period. The increase was driven by successive model and product releases that drove higher usage, expansion, and broader adoption across its offerings. The number of customers with $100,000 or more of revenue grew from more than 600 as of June 30, 2025, to more than 6,000 as of June 30, 2026. Total revenue from these customers grew from $870 million for the six months ended June 30, 2025, to $12.0 billion for the six months ended June 30, 2026, and represented approximately 75% and 74% of total revenue for the six months ended June 30, 2025, and 2026, respectively. Its business trajectory and financial profile have enabled the company to raise capital from investors and partners. As of June 30, 2026, the company had raised an aggregate of $141.1 billion of capital and had cash and cash equivalents of $112.4 billion and short-term investments of $19.3 billion. However, this expansion also comes with the costs to fuel that trajectory and the continued investment in related research and technology. Anthropic has incurred net losses in each year since its founding, including a net loss of $1.5 billion, $8.3 billion, and $42.0 billion in 2023, 2024, and 2025, respectively, and $80.7 billion for the six months ended June 30, 2026, of which about $72.4 billion of that was for an accounting charge tied to its convertible notes.

Anthropic and pharma
In identifying strategic opportunities, Anthropic points to the bio/pharma industry as part of its potential growth engine. “There are many opportunities to speed up drug development, even beyond the most commonly discussed applications of AI, like proposing initial designs for new molecules,” said Anthropic in an October 27, 2026, press statement in highlighting its strategy in drug development. “Developing a drug involves many varied tasks: doing early research to identify a target for a drug and the right type of drug to engage it, designing a molecule with the right properties, optimizing it to be manufactured reliably at scale, drafting the regulatory filings needed to run clinical trials, designing and administering those trials, and much more. Our strategy to realize AI’s medical benefits is based on having AI increasingly involved in all of these tasks.”

Illustrative of that strategy is Anthropic’s Claude for Life Sciences, an AI-driven research suite designed to accelerate R&D from initial discovery through clinical translation and regulatory compliance. In addition, Anthropic has several research partnerships with both large pharma companies and biotech companies. Last month (September 2026), Anthropic and Novo formed a partnership to accelerate the development of new medicines and advance AI-driven software development. The companies will jointly address key drug-discovery challenges identified by scientists and computational teams at Novo, develop targeted solutions for specific scientific challenges and workflows to support biological reasoning, and help accelerate the discovery and development of new medicines. As an initial aim, Novo will test Claude for specific workflows in R&D and address scientific problems where the joint capabilities of Novo and Anthropic are expected to have the greatest impact.

Earlier this year (May 2026), Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) announced a partnership to deploy Anthropic’s Claude across BMS’ research, clinical development, manufacturing, commercial, and corporate functions. BMS says the collaboration signals a meaningful evolution in how BMS deploys AI, moving beyond conversational tools that have defined the first wave of enterprise adoption, toward agentic capabilities built into the day-to-day workflows and systems that underpin its science and global operations. BMS said it would deploy Claude broadly across the company for more than 30,000 employees with advanced reasoning and agentic capabilities. The deployment focuses on three priorities where BMS expects the highest near-term impact. BMS’ engineering and data science teams will use Claude Code to speed software and AI development. BMS will evaluate the potential for Claude to serve as the agentic layer within priority workflows where AI is already driving impact across the value chain, including research, drug development, manufacturing and quality, and commercial and medical affairs.

Among smaller companies, Anthropic has research partnerships with the following: BigHat Biosciences for agentic-driven therapeutic antibody optimization; Divergence Labs for generating antibody designs for potential therapeutics for food allergies; Enveda Biosciences for developing and testing of a CMC (chemistry, manufacturing and controls) tool, a CMC Document Processor built around Claude for evaluating CMC batch records; Generate Biomedicines for redesigning of a component of a T cell therapy; and the Column Group, an investment firm using Claude through one of its companies in drug discovery.