Anthropic, the publisher of Claude, filed its S-1 registration statement with the SEC on 26 octobre, ahead of an IPO.
A misleading loss
Of this amount, 72,4 billion dollars come from an accounting operation: the revaluation of its convertible bonds, whose value rises with that of the company. Once this line is removed, the loss shrinks to 693 million dollars for the semester, with revenue of 16,3 billion dollars, versus 1,2 billion a year earlier. In the second quarter, Anthropic posted its first operating profit, of 974 million dollars.
Revenue swallowed by compute
Revenue is however largely consumed by compute, i.e., the computing power required for training and inference, in other words for running the models. According to Journal du Net, this line takes up more than half of revenue. Anthropic has diversified its supplies by signing with eight providers: Broadcom, SpaceXAI, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Nscale, Lambda and AMD. According to the media’s calculations, its cumulative commitments exceed 650 billion dollars, i.e., forty times its semester revenue. Four of these providers, SpaceXAI, Amazon, Google and Microsoft, also develop their own models.
Margin and dependence on SpaceX
Anthropic itself states in its prospectus that its margin will compress, each new compute capacity weighing on the books before generating revenue. The company also anticipates a slowdown in its growth, with a more pronounced seasonality: the end‑of‑year holidays in 2025 caused Claude customers’ spending to drop by about 20 % in two weeks.
The contract signed with Elon Musk’s group is the heaviest in monthly rhythm, amounting to 3,1 billion dollars per month once all capacity is delivered, by December 2026. It can, however, be terminated with 90‑day notice from 2027 onward. If SpaceX ended the agreement, Anthropic would have to do without its primary compute supplier in just three months.
Power that is not shared
Claude’s publisher plans to list its Class A shares on Nasdaq under the ticker “ANT”, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley handling the process. Just before the listing, Anthropic will issue a Class F share, devoid of any economic rights and assigned to its seven co‑founders. This sole share will represent 50,1 % of voting rights.
