Anthropic S-1 shows $16.3B in sales, an $80.7B loss and big bets

The short answer: sales are soaring. For the first half of 2025, Anthropic made $1.16 billion. For the same stretch of 2026, it made $16.3 billion. The company told investors in mid-October that third-quarter revenue reached $16.8 billion, so a single quarter now beats the whole first half of this year.

Much of that comes from a small group of very large buyers. Anthropic’s five biggest customers drove roughly 25% of revenue over the first nine months of the year, and their spending hit a record in the quarter ending September 30. The company also reports a net revenue retention rate of nearly 900%. In plain terms, that measure compares what existing customers spend now with what they spent before, so a figure that high means current clients are pouring far more money in, not just sticking around.

There’s a twist buried in the growth. Between 5% and 7% of revenue over January to September, Anthropic says, came from customers breaking its own rules, including distillation, where a rival trains its own model on Claude’s answers. Anthropic says it is getting better at catching this, which should shrink that slice and could dent revenue along the way.

Anthropic lost about $42 billion in 2025 on revenue of $4.6 billion. The first-half 2026 loss of $80.7 billion is nearly double that full-year figure, though the company attributes much of it to an accounting adjustment rather than cash going out the door.

The real long-term cost is computing power, which the filing calls the biggest operating cost in the business. Fixed or minimum-guaranteed deals already lock Anthropic into at least $265.6 billion of spending on cloud services, chips and infrastructure. Footnotes go further. Counting leases signed or changed since the end of 2025, new infrastructure deals added since June 30, expansions not yet finalized, and short-term agreements it can’t cancel, the company could owe an estimated $808 billion at minimum.

One deal shows the scale. Under arrangements with SpaceXAI for access to Nvidia graphics chips, Anthropic agreed to spend up to $120.5 billion over terms running into 2029, about $3.1 billion a month once all the capacity arrives, which it expects in December 2026. It is also building a setup it calls Anthropic Direct, buying AI chips itself and running them in leased data centers, so it relies less on Amazon and Google for cloud capacity.

Several important numbers are simply missing. The filing leaves gaps where third-quarter results and the total committed spending on its contracts should be. Accounting experts say this is common in a first draft, partly because the quarter only closed a few weeks ago.

Michael Dambra, who teaches accounting and law in Buffalo, New York, said SEC rules would force Anthropic to add third-quarter financials if it lists after roughly mid-November. He also pointed out that companies that redact parts of their S-1 have tended to price their shares lower at the IPO, to win over wary buyers. Expect an updated filing that fills in many of the blanks before trading starts.

The risk factors run past 90 pages, the longest section of the document. The line drawing the most attention: if its AI were ever involved in a true disaster, Anthropic warns, the bill could be bigger than the entire insurance industry is able to pay.

Other warnings are more down to earth. Big customers can switch providers, and Anthropic expects its growth rate to swing around and slow over time. Local opposition to data centers is rising, and some places have approved or are weighing bans on large new builds. Much of its traffic runs under zero data retention terms, where it keeps classifier scores but not the prompts or replies themselves. That protects customer privacy, but Anthropic says it also limits how well the company can investigate misuse or answer subpoenas.

If you use Claude, nothing changes today. Your account, prices and data terms stay the same; an IPO changes who owns the company, not the product. Over time, public shareholders will press for profits, so watch for price changes on paid plans and API access.

If you’re thinking about buying shares, a few practical points:

• Ordinary investors usually can’t buy at the IPO price. Most people can buy once ANT starts trading through a regular brokerage app.
• Shares often swing hard in the first days of trading, especially for hyped tech listings.
• If you hold a broad US or Nasdaq index fund, you may end up owning a slice once the stock is added to those indexes, without doing anything.
• Read the risk section yourself. It is long, but it lays out the company’s own worries in plain sight. This is general information, not personal financial advice.

For context, Anthropic was valued at $965 billion in May, above the $852 billion valuation OpenAI reached in March. Its headcount nearly tripled in a year to about 5,300 people as of September 30, and revenue per employee topped $6.6 million, behind only Nvidia among the biggest US tech names.