Economic Observer reporter Zheng Chenye

On October 26th Eastern Time, American artificial intelligence company Anthropic publicly submitted its prospectus to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, intending to list on NASDAQ under the stock code "ANT", with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley serving as lead underwriters. The prospectus has not yet provided the number of shares to be issued and the price range, but the market expects Anthropic to raise approximately $100 billion, with a valuation of up to $2 trillion. If the issuance is completed according to this, its fundraising scale will exceed the record set by SpaceX in June this year, becoming the largest IPO in history.

Anthropic was founded in 2021, with a founding team from OpenAI. Its main product is the Claude series of large models. Anthropic is not the first large model company to enter the public market. In January of this year, Chinese large model companies Zhipu and MiniMax were listed on the Hong Kong stock market. The listing of Anthropic also affects several US tech companies, with Google and Amazon as its investors, and Broadcom, Microsoft, AMD, and other computing power suppliers.

According to Anthropic's prospectus, Claude will begin commercialization in the first quarter of 2023, with a revenue of $41 million that year, increasing to $4.585 billion in 2025 and $16.286 billion in the first half of 2026, a year-on-year increase of 1300%. In the second quarter of 2026, Anthropic also achieved operating profit. From the data of each period, this is its first quarter of operating profit.

While revenue is growing rapidly, Anthropic's investment in computing power and funding needs are also rapidly increasing. The computing power contracts it has signed with companies such as Google and Amazon are worth billions of dollars and have a maximum term of 2036. Whether high growth can sustain expected valuation and investment pressure is an issue that cannot be avoided when facing the market during IPO.

Growth And Valuation

In the past year, the valuations of top model companies have significantly increased, mainly supported by the rapid growth of revenue. According to Anthropic's previously released information, its valuation after the completion of the F-round financing in September 2025 was $183 billion, and after the completion of the H-round financing in May 2026, it rose to $965 billion, higher than OpenAI's post investment valuation of $852 billion after the financing was completed in March 2026.

Entering 2026, Anthropic's revenue growth is accelerating, with single quarter revenue increasing from $376 million in the first quarter of 2025 to $11.555 billion in the second quarter of 2026, which is approximately 2.5 times its full year revenue for 2025. As of September 30, 2026, over 11900 customers have contributed revenue of over $100000 in the past twelve months, and over 1900 customers have contributed revenue of over $1 million.

The main paying customers are corporate clients. According to Anthropic, as of September 30, 2026, more than half of the Fortune 500 companies had contributed over $100000 in revenue in the past twelve months. However, the fees paid by these companies to Anthropic in the third quarter of 2026 averaged less than 0.1% of their total expenses, and even the top ten paying companies had less than 1%. In addition, revenue is also spreading to more customers. In the third quarter of 2026, customers outside of the top five contributed approximately 79% of revenue.

The usage of models by enterprises and developers, which is billed based on the amount of text processed by the model, is the main source of revenue for Anthropic. In the first half of 2026, this portion of revenue will be $13.1 billion, accounting for approximately 80% of its total revenue, with the remainder being subscription revenue from applications such as Claude.

Anthropic stated in its prospectus that when new models have stronger capabilities and lower costs for completing individual tasks, customers typically expand their use. For example, in November 2025, Anthropic launched the Opus 4.5 with stronger capabilities and lower prices. Since then, the month on month growth rate of revenue has accelerated from 48% in the fourth quarter of 2025 to 132% in the first quarter of 2026. The new model has a direct impact on revenue, and the model version released from April to September 2026 contributed over 80% of its revenue in the third quarter of 2026.

Anthropic also mentioned that the expansion of customer spending is related to the popularity of programming agents such as Claude Code: in the third quarter of 2026, Claude Enterprise users who did not use Claude Code had an average monthly expenditure of less than $75; Among users who use Claude Code, the top 5% have the highest expenditure, with an average monthly expenditure about 20 times that of the former. Anthropic is also heavily using Claude Code internally. By September 2026, over 90% of the code submitted to its codebase was written by Claude.

Revenue growth exceeded cost growth, resulting in Anthropic achieving an operating profit of $974 million in the second quarter of 2026. During the quarter, its revenue increased by 1368% year-on-year, while computing power and infrastructure expenses increased by 300%. The latter's proportion of revenue has also decreased from 251% in the first quarter of 2025 to 48% in the second quarter of 2026.

However, in terms of net profit, Anthropic is still in a significant loss state: a net loss of $80.748 billion in the first half of 2026, of which $72.388 billion came from fair value changes in financial instruments such as convertible notes. The company explained that this is mainly due to the increase in company valuation, which has led to an increase in the fair value of issued notes, and this loss does not involve cash outflows; During the same period, Anthropic's net cash inflow from operating activities was $3.929 billion.

However, Anthropic also noted in its prospectus that revenue growth will decline over time, and the rate of decline and speed may exceed expectations. In addition, the company also expects the absolute amount of computing power and infrastructure costs to continue to increase.

Investment And Income

Training new models and responding to every customer call requires a significant amount of chip and data center resources, making computing power one of the main expenses for large model companies.

For Anthropic, computing power and infrastructure costs are already its largest operating expenses, with a total of $7.326 billion in 2025, approximately three times the amount in 2024 and 1.6 times the revenue for that year. In the first half of 2026, this expense was $8.945 billion, accounting for approximately 55% of its revenue for the same period.

Nevertheless, computing power remains a scarce resource, and the company stated in its prospectus that it has been in a state where customer demand exceeds available computing power. In order to lock in the supply of computing power, most of its computing power is purchased under multi-year contracts, usually locked in 12 to 18 months in advance, and only paid and included in the cost when the computing power can be put into use. That is to say, this part of the cost increases with the delivery rhythm stipulated in the contract and does not increase or decrease with changes in current demand.

Anthropic trains and runs Claude's large model, using four types of chips including Amazon Trainium, Google TPU, Nvidia GPU, and AMD GPU. Its computing power contracts also cover multiple tech giants. Among them, multiple five-year equipment leasing agreements were signed with Broadcom, with a total rent of approximately $1612 billion, excluding interest; The contracts with Google and Amazon promise expenditures of over $110 billion, with terms expiring in 2033 and 2036 respectively; The contract with Microsoft promises to spend at least $44.9 billion.

In addition, Anthropic has promised to purchase more computing power from TPU suppliers such as Google between 2028 and 2031; The agreement with AMD stipulates that starting from 2027, a complete cabinet system based on AMD GPUs will be purchased. If the first batch of production capacity is fully purchased, the expenditure will exceed 20 billion US dollars; NVIDIA GPU computing power is also provided by computing service providers such as Nscale and Lambda, with Anthropic signing contracts worth billions of dollars with both.

Most of these contracts are irrevocable, and the corresponding computing power will be gradually implemented in the coming years.

Anthropic also mentioned in its prospectus that an increasing amount of investment will be used to build its own computing power and infrastructure, extending upstream into the computing power supply chain. The seven co founders also acknowledged in their letter to investors that such investments may appear irresponsible at first glance, but their basis is the law of scale, which states that as computing power, data, and model scale increase, AI capabilities and economic value will also rapidly increase.

In addition, the computing power supplier is also a shareholder and sales channel of Anthropic. For example, Google and Amazon invest in Anthropic by subscribing to non voting preferred shares and convertible notes, Broadcom can provide financing for its rent payments by purchasing convertible notes, and AMD promises to subscribe for up to $5 billion worth of Anthropic shares after GPU delivery and deployment reach the agreed upon milestones; Claude can also be directly accessed on the cloud platforms of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. In the first half of 2026, revenue generated through the cloud marketplace of cloud service providers accounted for approximately 48% of Anthropic's total revenue, compared to only 11% in 2023.

A huge investment requires continuous financing. In the first half of 2026, Anthropic's net cash inflow from fundraising activities was approximately $110.8 billion, mainly from the issuance of redeemable convertible preferred shares. The IPO will open up public market financing channels for Anthropic. According to the arrangement in the prospectus, the net proceeds from this fundraising will be used for general company purposes, including working capital, operating expenses, as well as capital expenditures such as computing power and infrastructure; This issuance also includes the sale of shares by some existing shareholders, and the proceeds from this will not belong to Anthropic.

It is worth noting that Anthropic's control arrangement is also different from most listed companies - as a Delaware public interest company, its board of directors also needs to take into account the company's purpose, with four out of seven directors elected by long-term interest trusts that have no financial interest in the company; The limited liability company established by the seven co founders will hold one Class F share, but will have a fixed ownership of 50.1% of all voting rights. That is to say, including IPO investors, the total voting rights of Class A shareholders are only up to 49.9%. Anthropic also reminds that in the foreseeable future, Class A shareholders are usually unable to influence the voting results.

In the prospectus, Anthropic also mentioned the fierce market competition it faces - major competitors such as Google and OpenAI are also developing increasingly powerful AI systems, competing with Anthropic for customers, talent, computing power, and strategic partnerships.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly stated in September this year that OpenAI will not go public this year. This also means that if Anthropic successfully completes its IPO within this year, it will be ahead of its main competitor and fully entrust the revenue, cost, and computing power commitments of a leading large model company to the public market for pricing.

(Author Zheng Chenye)