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- 0:00 Anthropic made $16
- 0:02 billion
- 0:04 and reported an $80 billion loss.
- 0:07 How can both be true?
- 0:09 When a company wants to sell shares to
- 0:11 the public for the first time, that's
- 0:13 called an IPO, an initial public
- 0:16 offering. Before it can, it has to file
- 0:18 a document called an S-1 with the SEC,
- 0:22 the government agency that oversees the
- 0:23 stock market. Think of the S-1 as the
- 0:26 company opening its diary. How it makes
- 0:28 money, how much it spends, who's in
- 0:31 charge, and what could go wrong.
- 0:33 On October 26th, Anthropic, the company
- 0:36 behind Claude, filed its S-1. It plans
- 0:39 to list on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange
- 0:41 under the ticker ANT, the short code
- 0:44 you'd type to buy the stock. The share
- 0:46 price hasn't been set yet.
- 0:48 Start with revenue, the money coming in.
- 0:51 In 2023, Anthropic made about $40
- 0:54 million.
- 0:55 In 2024, almost 400 million. In 2025,
- 1:00 4.6 billion. And in just the first 6
- 1:03 months of 2026, over $16 billion. That's
- 1:08 more in half a year than in its entire
- 1:10 history before it.
- 1:12 Most of that money comes from
- 1:13 businesses. Companies pay to use Claude,
- 1:16 its coding assistant Claude Code, and
- 1:18 its work assistant Cowork. Often, they
- 1:21 pay by how much they use, like a utility
- 1:23 bill, plus subscriptions. As of
- 1:26 September, nearly 12,000 customers were
- 1:28 paying over $100,000 a year. 1,900 paid
- 1:33 over a million, and about 250 paid more
- 1:36 than 10 million each.
- 1:38 So, what about that $80 billion loss?
- 1:41 Most of it isn't money that left the
- 1:43 bank.
- 1:44 Early on, investors gave Anthropic cash
- 1:46 in exchange for IOUs. That's short for I
- 1:50 owe you. Written promises to hand them
- 1:52 shares later.
- 1:53 As Anthropic's value soared, those
- 1:55 promised shares became worth far more,
- 1:58 and accounting rules count that rise as
- 2:00 a loss on paper. Over 70 billion dollars
- 2:04 of the loss came from this alone.
- 2:06 The day-to-day business tells a
- 2:07 different story. It's operating loss,
- 2:10 what it lost just from running the
- 2:11 company, shrank from about 8 billion
- 2:14 dollars in 2025 to under 700 million in
- 2:17 the first half of 2026.
- 2:20 Running AI takes enormous computing
- 2:22 power. The industry just calls it
- 2:24 compute. Warehouses full of specialized
- 2:27 chips. Anthropic spent almost 9 billion
- 2:30 dollars on compute in 6 months, more
- 2:32 than half of its revenue. And it has
- 2:35 signed long-term deals to rent much more
- 2:38 from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and
- 2:41 SpaceX. The filing shows Anthropic
- 2:43 agreed to pay SpaceX's AI division, run
- 2:46 by Elon Musk, up to 120 billion dollars
- 2:50 for computing power. That's about 3
- 2:52 billion dollars a month once it's fully
- 2:54 running. From a company that also builds
- 2:56 its own competing AI. To pay for all
- 2:59 this, Anthropic is sitting on about 132
- 3:02 billion dollars in cash and investments.
- 3:05 Here's where it gets unusual. If you buy
- 3:08 ANT shares, you get one vote per share.
- 3:11 But you won't be steering. Anthropic's
- 3:14 seven co-founders hold a single special
- 3:16 share with just over half of all the
- 3:18 voting power. A separate group of
- 3:20 independent experts, called the
- 3:22 Long-Term Benefit Trust, picks most of
- 3:25 the board, the group that oversees the
- 3:27 company's leaders. Big partners like
- 3:29 Amazon mostly hold shares with no vote
- 3:31 at all. And Anthropic is a public
- 3:34 benefit corporation, a company legally
- 3:36 required to weigh a mission, in its case
- 3:39 developing AI safely, alongside making
- 3:41 money.
- 3:42 Every S-1 has a section called risk
- 3:45 factors, a list of everything that could
- 3:47 go wrong. Anthropic's list is unusual.
- 3:51 Beyond needing enormous computing power,
- 3:53 relying on a few big customers, and
- 3:55 racing competitors, it warns that its
- 3:58 AI's abilities could outpace its safety
- 4:00 measures, and that it may delay releases
- 4:02 to stay careful, even when that costs
- 4:05 money.
- 4:06 So, the big question is simple. Can
- 4:08 revenue keep outrunning the cost of the
- 4:10 computers it needs?
- 4:12 The S-1 shows a company growing faster
- 4:14 than almost any in history, with an
- 4:16 unusual setup designed to keep its
- 4:18 mission in charge. Whether that makes it
- 4:20 a good investment is up to you. This
- 4:23 isn't financial advice.