Anthropic puts 5% of its shares in a public benefit fund on October 18, 2026, days after a reported $16.8 billion quarter

Anthropic said on Sunday, October 18, 2026 that it will place 5% of its shares in a new Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, subject to stockholder approval, and add 2% more for every 50% rise in the company's value above a baseline it has not yet disclosed. The fund is a wholly owned limited liability company, and the Anthropic equity it holds may not be used for lobbying or political donations. The announcement came four days after the Financial Times reported that Anthropic told investors its third-quarter revenue reached $16.8 billion and that it was profitable on an adjusted basis.

Anthropic, which makes the Claude AI models, was valued at $965 billion in its most recent funding round in May and has confidentially filed for a US stock market listing, so the size of the fund depends on a price the public market has not yet set.

How the fund works

At the $965 billion valuation of the May round, 5% of the company would be worth about $48 billion. Anthropic counts the fund alongside two earlier commitments, a pledge by its co-founders to give away 80% of their equity and a company match for employees who donate shares, and said that together about 20% of its shares are now committed to public-benefit giving. It also pointed to $200 million it committed in June to study how AI affects jobs; that money was announced on June 10 and is separate from the new fund.

The numbers behind the announcement

According to people at an October 14 investor meeting in San Francisco with chief executive Dario Amodei and chief financial officer Krishna Rao, third-quarter revenue rose about 45% from $11.6 billion in the second quarter, after $4.7 billion in the first. Reports from the meeting put gross margin at 85% and adjusted operating margin at about 11%. Anthropic declined to comment on the figures, and they are not audited results.

What it means for the IPO

Anthropic submitted a confidential draft registration statement to the SEC on June 1, 2026, and Reuters has since reported on the prospectus. Because the additions are tied to the company's value above a baseline that has not been published, the eventual size of the fund depends on where Anthropic's shares trade once they are listed. The Series H round included $15 billion of earlier commitments from cloud providers, $5 billion of it from Amazon. For comparison, a Financial Times report on October 8 put OpenAI's annualized revenue at about $50 billion, covered in our report on that figure.