The Anthropic story

The business today

Anthropic is a research lab with an enterprise software business built around Claude. Its models handle reasoning, coding, and other knowledge work. Claude Platform lets developers build those capabilities into their own products and workflows, while Anthropic’s applications offer ready-made ways to use them. Claude Code plans, writes, tests, and debugs software. Claude Cowork reads files, navigates applications, and carries out tasks on a user’s desktop.

The main revenue engine is usage. Customers pay for tokens, with pricing determined by the model they choose, so spending depends on both the volume of work and the capability required. Some applications also carry subscription fees for a specified allowance of usage and features, with additional usage available beyond that allowance. Consumption-based revenue was $13.1 billion in the six months to June 2026, while subscription-based revenue was $3.2 billion in the same period. Some enterprise customers sign non-cancelable annual or multi-year contracts with minimum spending commitments.

Customers range from large enterprises and startups to research institutions and individual professionals. Anthropic contracts directly with customers, including those accessing Claude through AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure, and pays fees to those cloud providers. The United States accounted for $11.8 billion of revenue in the six months to June 2026, with international customers contributing $4.5 billion in the same period. The commercial logic is to enter through a useful task, often software development, then spread into more workflows within the organization.

How Anthropic got here

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by researchers with a mission of developing and maintaining advanced AI for humanity’s long-term benefit. Claude’s commercial launch followed in the first quarter of 2023. Revenue rose from $41 million in 2023 to $386 million in 2024 and $4.6 billion in 2025. That progression changed the scale of the business, but not its dependence on continued research and access to computing capacity.

Outside capital financed that expansion. Cash proceeds from convertible notes were $1.8 billion in 2023, $6.0 billion in 2024, and $3.5 billion in 2025. Net proceeds from redeemable convertible preferred stock were $16.5 billion in 2025 and $110.4 billion in the six months to June 2026. By 30 June 2026, Anthropic had raised an aggregate of $141.1 billion of capital. Its S-1, filed 26 October 2026, seeks a listing on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under ANT. Its shares do not yet trade.

The corporate structure preserves the mission alongside the financing. Anthropic is a Delaware public benefit corporation whose directors must balance stockholders’ financial interests, the interests of people affected by its conduct, and its stated public purpose. In 2023, it introduced the Long-Term Benefit Trust, a financially disinterested body that generally can elect and remove a majority of the authorized board. Immediately before the offering’s completion, a founder entity is to receive Class F stock carrying 50.1% of voting power on matters submitted to stockholders generally, including elections of directors outside the trust’s class. Together, the trust and founder entity will be able to elect the entire board.

How the numbers work

The operating record shows how quickly revenue caught up with spending. Operating losses were $935 million in the quarter to March 2025, $1.2 billion in the quarter to June 2025, $3.1 billion in the quarter to September 2025, and $2.8 billion in the quarter to December 2025. The operating loss narrowed to $1.7 billion in the quarter to March 2026, followed by operating income of $974 million in the quarter to June 2026. Across the six months to June 2026, Anthropic still recorded an operating loss of $693 million on revenue of $16.3 billion.

Compute is the largest operating cost, but it is not the only one. In the six months to June 2026, compute and infrastructure expense was $8.9 billion, personnel expense was $3.2 billion, sales, marketing, and partnerships expense was $3.2 billion, and other operating and administrative expense was $1.7 billion. Total operating expenses reached $17.0 billion in that period. The improvement was especially visible in the quarter to June 2026, when revenue reached $11.6 billion against compute and infrastructure expense of $5.6 billion. This expense category supports research, model development, customer service, and internal Claude use, not just customer workloads.

The much larger net loss tells a different story from the operating result. In the six months to June 2026, Anthropic recorded a net loss of $80.7 billion, including a $72.4 billion noncash charge from changes in the fair value of convertible notes, derivative liabilities, and SAFEs. Its cash flow reconciliation also included $8.7 billion for recognition and changes in the fair value of other financial instruments in that period. In the quarter to June 2026 alone, the financing fair value charge was $59.6 billion, helping explain how operating income coexisted with a net loss of $66.3 billion. Those accounting charges are not equivalent to cash spent running the business.

Operating activities generated $3.9 billion of cash in the six months to June 2026, compared with an outflow of $2.6 billion in 2025. Investing activities used $17.2 billion in the six months to June 2026, while financing activities supplied $110.8 billion in the same period. As of 30 June 2026, cash and cash equivalents were $112.4 billion and short-term investments were $19.3 billion. That liquidity sits beside fixed or minimum compute commitments of $265.6 billion as of 30 June 2026. Anthropic generally commits to capacity before it becomes available, and expense begins as capacity comes online, before the revenue it may support is fully realized.

Catalysts already in motion

The proposed listing changes both funding access and the capital structure. The offering documents contemplate conversion of preferred stock and convertible notes as part of the transaction. As of 30 June 2026, the balance sheet carried convertible notes payable of $108.6 billion and redeemable convertible preferred stock of $157.5 billion. Conversion is a change in the form of financing, not new operating revenue. The offering’s price range, share count, and proceeds remain unspecified.

Compute expansion is already a contractual undertaking. Non-cancelable purchase commitments totaled $54.6 billion as of 31 December 2025, including $7.1 billion scheduled for 2026 and $11.1 billion for 2027. The later disclosure of $265.6 billion in fixed or minimum compute commitments as of 30 June 2026 shows the scale of capacity being secured, although the disclosures use different descriptions. Anthropic is also moving beyond fixed-term cloud agreements through Anthropic Direct, which separates commitments for data center space from commitments for the chips hosted inside it.

The product range is broadening beyond coding. Claude Code entered research preview in February 2025, followed by Claude Cowork in January 2026. In September 2026, Anthropic began merging Cowork and Claude.ai into a unified application for conversational and more autonomous work. In the nine months to September 2026, it launched an aggregate of 250 model versions, platform features, and applications. Its multi-chip architecture runs across AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, and AMD GPUs, allowing workloads to move among different hardware families.

The customer base is becoming less concentrated even as large accounts expand. Customer C represented 43% of revenue in 2023 and 11% in the six months to June 2026. No customer represented more than 10% of revenue in the nine months to September 2026. Approximately 79% of revenue came from outside the top five customers in the quarter to September 2026, compared with approximately 64% in the quarter to March 2026. Anthropic also reported more than 11,900 customers generating $100,000 or more of trailing revenue as of 30 September 2026, alongside net revenue retention of approximately 900% as of that date.

What could change the story

• Compute obligations can outrun demand. Fixed or minimum compute commitments were $265.6 billion as of 30 June 2026, and Anthropic generally must meet them regardless of revenue or utilization. Capacity arriving in large steps can raise expense before customer usage catches up, while supplemental short-term compute typically costs more per unit.
• Access to hardware is not assured by access to capital. Chip and memory supply, power, data center capacity, and export controls can constrain available compute. Some cloud providers are simultaneously Anthropic’s suppliers, investors, customers, and competitors, creating potential conflicts over costs and workload priority.
• Model leadership requires repeated renewal. Anthropic ties customer adoption to continued advances in capability, while warning that competition, loss of key technical people, or slower market development could impair growth. Model versions released in the six months to September 2026 accounted for over 80% of revenue in the quarter to September 2026, illustrating how quickly the business depends on newer releases.
• Safety failures can create commercial and legal costs. Anthropic warns that misuse, failed safeguards, and unintended autonomous behavior could cause harm, litigation, and regulatory action, with contractual protections and insurance potentially insufficient. The Bartz settlement expense was $1.5 billion in the quarter to September 2025, while safety evaluations have also led Anthropic to delay or restrict model releases.
• Public shareholders will not control the mission. The trust and founder entity will together be able to elect all directors, and the public benefit structure permits decisions that balance financial interests against other objectives. Public benefit initiatives and related share issuances can also increase expenses or dilute ownership.

What to watch next

• Amended offering documents will establish the transaction’s dimensions. The price range, shares offered, net proceeds, conversion details, equity awards, and tax obligations associated with restricted stock unit settlement will clarify the post-offering capital structure and cash resources.
• The first quarterly report after listing will test the operating improvement. Revenue, compute expense, personnel costs, and sales, marketing, and partnerships expense will show whether the operating income recorded in the quarter to June 2026 persisted as additional capacity became available.
• Cash generation and capacity payments need to be read together. Operating cash flow, investing outflows, updated compute commitments, and the Anthropic Direct build-out will show how much expansion is being funded by customer activity versus outside capital.
• Customer breadth and usage will show how adoption is developing. Net revenue retention, spending tiers, concentration, and consumption-based revenue will help distinguish expansion within existing accounts from broader adoption. Accounts receivable also merits attention after rising from $909 million as of 31 December 2025 to $5.8 billion as of 30 June 2026.

Sources

• Anthropic's S-1 registration statement, filed with the SEC
• The Anthropic pre-IPO report, for every figure