Anthropic Ahead of IPO: $17 Billion in Revenue and a $23 Billion Loss in Q3 2026

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Anthropic generated more revenue in a single quarter than in the entire first half of the year, and still lost $23 billion.

A week after publishing its IPO prospectus, the maker of Claude has filed its third-quarter figures. According to the amended Form S-1 Anthropic submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, the company generated about $17 billion (about €14.6 billion) in revenue between July and September, twelve times as much as in the same quarter a year earlier. For the first nine months of the year, revenue adds up to $33.24 billion (about €28.6 billion), an increase of roughly 1,200 percent. That also means the third quarter alone brought in more than the first two combined, which the original prospectus had put at about $16 billion. Annualized, Anthropic is heading for revenue of around $68 billion.

The Loss Is Growing Too

On the other side of the ledger is a net loss of $23.29 billion (about €20 billion) for the quarter, after $12.1 billion in the same quarter last year. Operating expenses rose 292 percent to $17.5 billion, roughly the level of revenue. For the first nine months, Anthropic reports a net loss of $104 billion (about €89 billion), after $25.1 billion in the same period of 2025. Most of that, however, is not an operating loss but an accounting effect, more on that in a moment.

The real cost driver lies elsewhere: Spending on compute and infrastructure rose by $14.4 billion, or 329 percent, over the nine months. “As our compute and infrastructure capacity grows, the associated compute and infrastructure expenses have increased,” Anthropic writes tersely.

Why Anthropic Still Talks About Profit

That there was talk of a “first profitable quarter” over the summer is no contradiction to the billions in losses, but a question of which metric you look at. On an operating basis, meaning revenue minus operating costs for compute, staff and research, Anthropic posted a profit of about $974 million in the second quarter, according to the prospectus, while the first half as a whole still showed an operating loss of $693 million because of the weaker first quarter. In the third quarter, $17.5 billion in operating expenses stand against about $17 billion in revenue, so operationally it is roughly a wash. The picture is better for the money that actually flows: Operating cash flow was a positive $3.9 billion in the first half, and reports suggest Anthropic also generated positive free cash flow in the third quarter, at a gross margin of about 85 percent.

The net loss stems almost entirely from the convertible notes through which Anthropic financed itself, above all with Amazon. The company accounts for them under the so-called fair value option: At each reporting date, the notes are revalued at the company’s current valuation, because their right to convert into shares gains value as the valuation rises. When the valuation climbs, as it did over the past year from about $61 billion to well over $900 billion, the carrying value of the notes rises with it, and that change has to be booked as an expense. In the first half, this item amounted to $72.4 billion, 90 percent of the loss, on only about $6.2 billion in capital actually raised. With the IPO, the notes convert into shares, after which the effect largely disappears. Until then, a paradoxical rule applies: The more successful Anthropic is, the bigger its reported loss.

$895 Billion in Commitments

The most striking number in the prospectus is neither revenue nor loss. Anthropic has entered into purchase and lease agreements with a total volume of about $895.4 billion (about €770 billion), “substantially all of which is related to compute and infrastructure.” About $448 billion of that falls due by the end of 2030, according to Bloomberg, with around $70 billion (about €60 billion) due in the twelve months through September 2027 alone. For comparison: That is more than four times the current quarterly revenue, per year. The commitments explain why Anthropic has to go public, and why the IPO is meant to be so large.

The valuation investors are quoting to the banks, according to Bloomberg, now stands at $1.4 trillion to $1.5 trillion (about €1.2 trillion to €1.3 trillion), with up to $1.75 trillion considered achievable. In its IPO, which is set to take place before Thanksgiving at the end of November, Anthropic wants to raise at least as much as SpaceX did in its record $86.2 billion debut. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the deal, with 20 other banks participating, and the stock will trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. It is the first IPO by a company whose core business is developing the most advanced A.I. models. OpenAI, the rival that Anthropic founder Dario Amodei and his colleagues once left, filed its prospectus confidentially in June but is aiming for 2027 and is raising billions more privately in the meantime.

The Market Is Jittery Right Now

The timing is delicate. In recent days, tech stocks have lost almost a trillion dollars in value after disappointing earnings, and the rotation out of the A.I. theme has begun. At the same time, the capital needs of the entire industry are turning absurd: Meta launched an equity raise of up to $98 billion on the day of Anthropic’s prospectus, Alphabet had raised $85 billion through new shares over the summer, and Oracle announced another $20 billion financing package on Monday after already raising about $50 billion this year. Anyone subscribing to Anthropic shares is betting not only on Claude but on the hyperscalers being able to keep building and paying for their data centers, because that is where most of the $895 billion ends up.

For skeptics, the prospectus itself supplies the arguments: more than 90 pages of risk factors, including political headwinds, dependence on a few cloud partners and the balancing act between safety ambitions and commercial goals, plus the company’s own assessment that the technology could pose “existential risks to humanity.” For supporters, the curve is what counts: A company that grows its revenue twelvefold in a year and whose quarterly revenue already exceeds its first half has a growth story the capital markets have never seen before. Whether it is worth $1.5 trillion will be decided in three weeks.