Anthropic stuns markets with low burn and rumours of Oct "going vertical"
What's the deal? Anthropic, PBC publicly filed its Form S-1 registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on 26 October 2026 for a proposed initial public offering of its Class A common stock. It intends to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker "ANT". The number of shares and the price range have not yet been set; Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are named as contacts for the preliminary prospectus. The company had filed confidentially in June, according to CNBC.
By the numbers Revenue rose to $16.29 billion in the six months to 30 June 2026, from $1.16 billion a year earlier; full-year 2025 revenue was $4.59 billion. Operating expenses were $16.98 billion, including $8.95 billion on compute and infrastructure, so the operating loss narrowed to $693 million from $2.14 billion in the first half of 2025. The headline net loss of $80.7 billion is mostly a $72.4 billion non-cash charge for changes in the fair value of convertible notes, derivative liabilities and SAFEs.
The cash pile "As of June 30, 2026, we had raised an aggregate of $141.1 billion of capital and had cash and cash equivalents of $112.4 billion and short-term investments of $19.3 billion," the filing says. The balance sheet also shows $108.6 billion of convertible notes payable. Research firm SemiAnalysis read that as roughly $9.7 billion burned to date, calling it "likely the most efficient scaling of a business in the history of capitalism", and said the company was profitable on an operating basis in the June quarter. Altimeter's Jamin Ball made the same point: less than $10 billion of total burn to reach the $16.8 billion of third-quarter revenue that has been widely reported (that quarter is not yet in the S-1).
Margins and customers In a benchmark of the filing against listed cloud companies, Jamin Ball calculated that Anthropic had more than $19 billion of revenue in the twelve months to 30 June, grew 1,368% year on year in the second quarter, and ran 85% gross margins and 21% free-cash-flow margins over the first half of 2026 (11% over twelve months). By his numbers, its twelve-month GAAP operating margin was minus 34% but reached 8% in the second quarter. The S-1 itself says the number of customers paying $100,000 or more a year rose from more than 950 to more than 11,900 between September 2025 and September 2026, with more than 1,900 paying over $1 million and about 250 over $10 million.
The compute bill The filing also lists Anthropic's compute deals. It agreed to spend up to $120.5 billion with SpaceXAI, the former xAI now owned by SpaceX, into 2029, about $3.1 billion a month once all capacity is delivered, expected in December 2026, and either side can cancel on 90 days' notice after early 2027. It committed at least $114.5 billion to Google (April 2026 to July 2033), at least $110 billion to Amazon (May 2026 to April 2036) and at least $44.9 billion to Microsoft (November 2026 to May 2033), plus up to about $44.6 billion with Nscale into 2033. Packy McCormick's Not Boring adds these up to $434.5 billion. Outside that table, Anthropic estimates $125–150 billion for additional TPU compute and expects to spend more than $20 billion on an initial 2027 tranche of AMD Helios systems.
October going vertical? Atreides Management's Gavin BakerDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → wrote that he was "shocked, absolutely shocked" that Anthropic's ARR has "likely gone vertical in October" after it cut token prices — and that the same pattern hit the wider AI market, with GPU rental prices surging while token prices fell. He pointed to OpenRouter usage data shared by @lfg_cap and said Anthropic would be unlikely to disclose October ARR in a future S-1 update if it were not positive. The filed S-1 has a placeholder for it, leaving blank both its run-rate revenue "as of October 31, 2026" and its third-quarter revenue. In a follow-up, Baker said Anthropic and/or OpenAI "running away with it" would still be "super net negative for AI infra", that their likely mid-single-digit-billion third-quarter compute spend is not especially relevant to the market, and that about $35 billion a year in future commitments is "easily digestible given their revenue". After "the insane carnage earlier this month", he said, he is open to the idea of a "Goldilocks" zone for Anthropic and OpenAI: "this kinda feels like it."
Who controls it? Anthropic is a Delaware public benefit corporation. Its Long-Term Benefit Trust, a body of financially disinterested trustees, holds Class T stock that elects directors who will make up a majority of the board. A single Class F share, held by an LLC whose members are CEO Dario Amodei, President Daniela Amodei and the five other co-founders, carries 50.1% of the votes on other matters. Employees will get non-economic Class E voting stock, and strategic partners mainly hold non-voting Class N shares. Anthropic will be a "controlled company" under Nasdaq rules.
What's next? CoinDesk, citing Fox Business's Liz Claman, reported that pricing on 19 or 20 November remains on track, and that the Financial Times says investors expect a valuation of $1.5–1.75 trillion. The filing follows weeks of reporting on a draft prospectus that set out Anthropic's compute commitments and customer concentration.
Sources: Anthropic · S-1 on SEC EDGAR · CNBC · CoinDesk · SemiAnalysis on X · Jamin Ball on X · Gavin Baker on X · Baker follow-up · Clouded Judgement (Jamin Ball) · Jamin Ball S-1 benchmark on X · Packy McCormick on X
