Anthropic Files S-1 in Sprint Toward IPO, Ten-Year Compute Bill and Revenue Growth Become Pricing Focus

An IPO that will test Wall Street's confidence in the AI boom has officially begun.

On October 26 local time, the U.S. artificial intelligence large-model company Anthropic submitted a public version of its S-1 filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), planning to list on Nasdaq under the ticker "ANT," with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading the underwriting. The issue price, number of shares to be offered, and fundraising size have not yet been determined, but market expectations for its valuation have already surged to $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion. If completed at the upper end, this would become one of the largest IPOs in history.

How can a company founded only five years ago achieve this scale? The prospectus gives a direct answer: revenue is "sprinting," quarterly operating profit has already turned positive, and enterprise customers are paying real money for tokens. But the same document also lays out the other side—hundreds of billions of dollars in computing bills for the coming years have already been signed, yet nearly 80% of revenue is settled based on actual usage, and most top customers have not yet signed long-term contracts.

From Wall Street to Silicon Valley and across the entire AI industry, the market is closely watching this IPO. What truly needs to be priced is not whether AI can make money, but whether growth can continue to outrun costs when a decade of bills has been signed in advance. "If Anthropic performs poorly after going public, investors will have to reprice AI companies," said Brad Bernstein, managing partner at FTV Capital, an institution focused on investing in growth stocks.

Anthropic's revenue curve is impressive.

Full-year revenue was $41 million in 2023, $386 million in 2024, and $4.585 billion in 2025. In the first half of 2026, it jumped directly to $16.286 billion, about 14 times the $1.163 billion in the same period the previous year. On a quarterly basis, revenue was $4.731 billion in the first quarter of this year and rose to $11.555 billion in the second quarter, an increase of about 144% quarter over quarter. There is not yet official exact data for the third quarter; it is estimated at about $16.8 billion, with quarter-over-quarter growth slowing to around 45%—still extremely fast, but no longer doubling consecutively.

More critical is the lower half of the income statement. In the second quarter of 2026, Anthropic achieved operating profit of $974 million, with an operating margin of about 8%; after excluding items such as stock-based compensation and non-cash charitable donations, adjusted operating profit reached $2.235 billion, with a margin of about 19%. By comparison, OpenAI's adjusted operating margin in the same period was about -122%.

What supports these numbers is the pace of adoption by enterprise customers. As of the end of September 2026, the number of customers that contributed more than $100,000 in revenue over the past 12 months exceeded 11,900, compared with only about 950 a year earlier; net revenue retention was about 900%—the same group of enterprise customers (excluding individual subscriptions) spent nine times as much in a single quarter as they did a year earlier.

At the same time, computing efficiency continued to improve: revenue generated per $1 spent on computing power and infrastructure rose from $0.40 in the first quarter of 2025 to $2.08 in the second quarter of 2026. Second-quarter revenue grew 1368% year over year, while computing spending increased only about 300%.

Anthropic's formal sprint toward an IPO has ignited the long-dormant global AI market, with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index surging 2.82% overnight. "This will be the first major opportunity for investors to invest directly in the companies driving the AI economy, and it is of enormous importance," said Gil Luria, head of technology research at U.S. financial services firm DA Davidson.

A decade of bills signed in advance

The sharpest contradiction in the prospectus is not in the income statement, but in the contracts.

In the first half of 2026, Anthropic's computing power and infrastructure costs were $8.945 billion, accounting for about 55% of revenue and already exceeding the full-year 2025 figure of $7.326 billion. The company does not mainly rely on building its own data centers, but obtains computing power through long-term procurement, equipment leasing, and third-party data center partnerships, with contracts typically locked in 12 to 18 months in advance.

In descending order of binding force, Anthropic's computing commitments can be divided into three tiers: rigid procurement commitments from Google, Amazon, and Microsoft total about $269.4 billion, plus about $161.2 billion in five-year equipment leasing from Broadcom, for a total of about $430.6 billion; if agreements with SpaceX AI, Nscale, Lambda, and others are also included, the seven named suppliers total about $637 billion; if several line items in the prospectus notes are added together, the broadest measure is about $850 billion.

The prospectus shows that among the computing expenditures Anthropic has committed to six partners, many contracts have terms of the next 7 to 10 years and are mostly non-cancelable, or must be paid regardless of whether they are used.

For reference, Anthropic's revenue over the past 12 months was about $35.3 billion. Calculated on the $850 billion basis, the computing commitments are about 24 times that.

Computing commitments are rigid costs locked in years in advance, while revenue occurs only after customers call on the services based on usage. About 80% of the company's revenue comes from enterprise pay-as-you-go API and token usage, with customers paying for what they use. In the first nine months of this year, the top five customers contributed about 25% of revenue, but most top customers have not signed long-term cooperation agreements.

This kind of relationship gradually creates a mismatch: revenue depends on how much AI customers will be willing to use in the future, while costs depend on how much computing power the company has already committed to buy today. If demand exceeds expectations, pre-locked computing power is a moat; if usage growth slows, rigid bills will in turn eat into profits and cash flow.

The accounting loss further amplifies outside concerns. In the first half of the year, Anthropic posted a net loss of $80.748 billion under GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles), of which about $72.388 billion came from fair value changes in convertible notes, derivative liabilities and SAFEs—the higher the company's valuation, the more valuable these convertible notes become, and the larger the accounting loss. Although this part is not a current cash outflow, and the related losses will basically stop after the notes convert to shares upon listing, the accounting loss does contain real costs. As of the end of June, about $26.6 billion in share-based compensation expense had not yet been recognized and is expected to be fully recognized in about 2.1 years; net operating cash inflow in the first half was $3.9 billion, which also includes the add-back of about $2.2 billion in non-cash expenses. Its ability to generate cash is improving, but it is not yet thick enough to ignore the bills.

Guosen Securities analysis said that about 80% of Anthropic's revenue comes from token-consumption-based billing, its net revenue retention rate is close to 900%, no single customer contributes more than 10%, and the quality and stickiness of its revenue are rare among large-model companies, but its reliance on three major cloud channels for distribution for nearly half of its revenue is a major hidden concern.

It is worth noting that Anthropic also wrote directly into its prospectus what it will not do. As a Delaware public benefit corporation, it promises not to do advertising or video generation, and prohibits its models from being used for fully autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. In April this year, the company trained Claude Mythos Preview, whose cybersecurity capabilities were too strong, and judged that the risk of broad release without safeguards was too great, so it delayed public release and opened it only to a small number of institutions for cyber defense purposes. The company acknowledged in its prospectus that this means giving up substantial revenue. At the same time, government contract revenue currently accounts for only about 1%, and relations with Washington have also become strained.

Anthropic's listing performance touches a nerve across the entire AI industry. If IPO pricing falls short of expectations, the shock will transmit layer by layer.

Jai Das, co-founder of venture capital firm Sapphire Ventures, said: "If its listing performance falls short of expectations, that would be a bit like a house of cards."

For OpenAI, Anthropic's IPO is likewise a mirror—the latter has secretly applied for listing but said it may not actually list until 2027. If Anthropic's listing performance is lackluster, it could further affect OpenAI's IPO and prompt investors to re-examine the high valuations of AI companies. At the same time, Federal Reserve rate hikes and rising US Treasury yields also mean that the cost of corporate bond financing is getting higher and higher.

However, some views hold that the market is overly worried. Das compares current AI infrastructure investment to the telecommunications and internet bubble of the late 1990s—at that time fiber-optic equipment flooded the market and a large number of companies collapsed, but the infrastructure was ultimately fully utilized. "In the long run, the market still has no shortage of demand for AI infrastructure." Rohit Kulkarni, a partner at Burnham Park Capital Markets, said Anthropic's financial condition is "better than the market had previously feared, but more negative news cannot be ruled out afterward."

Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy expressed support for Anthropic's listing: "Anthropic and OpenAI have now proven that they have the ability to stay at the forefront of AI and continue to drive innovation, and we very much support their listings." That said, Snowflake is also testing low-cost open AI large models from China's Moonshot AI, DeepSeek and Zhipu.

David Trainer, CEO of financial research firm New Constructions, wrote in a report last month that the AI boom is built on the foundation of cheap credit and "readily available" access to capital markets. If AI capital liquidity dries up, and there are clear signs of a sharp 20% downside risk in the S&P 500, then most of that would be concentrated in the valuations of AI-related stocks.

PIMCO analysis pointed out that as of September 23, AI-related issuers already accounted for nearly a quarter of US dollar non-financial corporate bond issuance, up from less than 13% in 2025 and about 4% in 2024; against the backdrop of higher US Treasury yields and rising financing costs, AI companies are still crowding into debt issuance, and the concentration of AI-related debt in the credit bond market continues to rise. JPMorgan Asset Management estimates that a complete data center buildout by 2030 may require about $5 trillion in funding, of which about $2 trillion may be financed through the investment-grade credit bond market.

Anthropic has already proven that frontier large models can quickly generate huge revenue, and that a single quarter's operations can cover costs recognized in the current period. But single-quarter profitability proves that the business model has the potential to deliver profits; it has not yet proven that such profitability can survive a growth cycle.

What it needs to prove next is whether revenue growth can continue to outpace the ladder of computing costs, whether customer usage can justify long-term investment, whether model efficiency gains can offset price pressure, and whether safety governance can remain stable under profitability requirements. This IPO is not just pricing a company; it is also testing a business model: when AI companies sign the bills for the next decade in advance, will the public market be willing to keep paying for the assumption that "growth outpaces costs"?