Anthropic returned to an operating loss in the third quarter, with total computing power commitments of about $895.4 billion

Revenue is still racing ahead, but the bills are running even faster. The latest prospectus filed by Anthropic on Monday local time shows that this AI star company returned to a loss after maintaining operating profitability for only a single quarter; and its nearly $900 billion in compute commitments are becoming the thorniest test on its sprint toward an IPO.

On November 2 local time, Anthropic submitted a revised prospectus to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), filling in the financial data for the third quarter of fiscal year 2026 (ended September 30) that had been left blank in the first version of the prospectus.

The data shows that the company's third-quarter revenue was about $17 billion, up about 47% from $11.6 billion in the second quarter and more than 10-fold from $1.4 billion in the same period last year. Compared with the 144% quarter-over-quarter increase in the second quarter, this growth rate has clearly slowed.

The prospectus also noted that in the first nine months of this year, 5% to 7% of revenue came from customers who violated its usage policies or commercial terms. The company has stepped up its crackdown on violations since August, and future revenue growth may therefore come under further pressure.

Operating profit "a flash in the pan"?

In the third quarter, Anthropic recorded an operating loss of $567 million, whereas in the previous quarter it achieved operating profit for the first time, in the amount of $974 million.

Note: Anthropic quarterly operating profit; of seven quarters, only the second quarter of 2026 was profitable

A major reason for the swing from profit to loss is the surge in compute costs. Anthropic usually signs long-term contracts 12 to 18 months in advance to reserve compute, but in the third quarter user demand growth exceeded expectations, the originally planned compute was insufficient, and the company had to urgently purchase an additional $5 billion in short-term compute at prices significantly higher than long-term contracts.

Affected by this, third-quarter compute and infrastructure spending surged 77% quarter-over-quarter to $9.9 billion. Every $1 invested in compute and infrastructure brought in only $1.72 of revenue, lower than $2.08 in the second quarter, marking the first decline in this metric.

Note: Revenue generated per $1 of compute and infrastructure spending

At the same time, price cuts on new models and contract discounts reduced third-quarter revenue by about $600 million. Rising costs combined with falling prices squeezed profit margins from both sides.

In addition, $2 billion in non-cash expenses related to the employee donation matching program were also recorded in the quarter. Excluding such items and stock-based compensation, Anthropic still had about $2.5 billion in adjusted operating profit, but the margin had already fallen from 19% to 15%.

According to reports, in order to escape high-priced short-term compute, Anthropic is advancing "Anthropic Direct." "Anthropic Direct" is dedicated compute infrastructure built by Anthropic for itself, aimed at replacing short-term compute with lower-cost long-term capacity.

As early as three days before the revised filing was released, Jay Goldberg, an analyst at U.S. investment research firm Seaport Research Partners, warned that Anthropic's profitability would be difficult to sustain and that it would return to losses in the future, and said bluntly that the situation its IPO faces is quite challenging.

A sky-high compute bill

The revised filing also disclosed for the first time the total amount of committed spending; the first version of the prospectus listed only the amounts of major contracts item by item, leaving the total column blank.

Including contracts newly signed after September 30, Anthropic's total purchase and lease commitments are about $895.4 billion, almost all for purchasing compute and leasing data centers, with payment periods extending all the way to 2045.

According to reports, the most urgent of these is about $69.8 billion due within the next 12 months. This figure already exceeds Anthropic's full-year revenue annualized based on third-quarter revenue, and is also equivalent to more than half of its roughly $131.8 billion in cash and short-term investments at the end of September.

The prospectus shows that the $895.4 billion is not the whole story. Anthropic also plans to purchase $125 billion to $150 billion of chips from Google and spend more than $20 billion with chip giant AMD. These two contracts are not yet included because no fixed amount has been agreed. The company estimates that such contracts will require about $150 billion to $175 billion in future payments, and after inclusion its total compute bill will exceed $1 trillion.

Note: Composition of Anthropic's compute bill ($100 million): contractual obligations 3200, signed but not yet commenced leases 4512, newly signed after September 30 1002, short-term commitments 240, totaling about 8954; plus an estimated 1500 to 1750 for unquantified contracts, for a total of about $1.06 trillion

Where is the money going?

From the division of labor in the AI industry chain, chip designers provide compute chips, cloud vendors and data center operators install the chips in server rooms and rent them out, and model companies like Anthropic rent compute to train and run models, then sell services to enterprise and individual users.

Anthropic's bills are paid precisely to the various links in this chain. Media reports pointed out that Broadcom ranks first with about $161.2 billion in TPU equipment leasing, and Alphabet's Google is no less than $121.3 billion, up from $114.5 billion in the first version of the prospectus.

Next is the AI division of Musk's SpaceX, with a contract amount capped at $120.5 billion; Amazon's contract amount is no less than $110 billion; and Microsoft's is $44.9 billion.

British AI cloud service provider Nscale and U.S. GPU cloud service provider Lambda also secured contracts capped at $44.6 billion and about $41.3 billion respectively, and whether some of these contracts can be performed depends on whether the counterparties can obtain financing or data center sites.

Such partnerships are quite complex. After Anthropic publicly filed its first version of the prospectus on October 26, Mark Mahaney, an analyst at U.S. investment bank research firm Evercore ISI, pointed out that for cloud computing giants, Anthropic is simultaneously a customer, a competitor, a sales channel and an investment target.

This article comes from the WeChat public account "STAR Market Daily," author: Li Ying, published by 36Kr with authorization.