Anthropic draft S-1 shows $16.3B revenue, heavy losses

Anthropic took in $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026, up from $1.1 billion a year earlier. Over the same six months it reported a net loss of $80.7 billion, according to a draft prospectus viewed by The Wall Street Journal and summarized by Investing.com. The filing also lists risks for a company getting ready for one of the largest stock market debuts in years. Two of them are that a small number of customers bring in much of its revenue and that its access to computing power is hard to predict.uk.investing.com+1

Losses and computing bills

Most of the loss is on paper. About $72 billion of the $80.7 billion came from non-cash accounting charges tied to convertible notes and other financing instruments. Anthropic spent almost $9 billion on computing capacity and infrastructure in the first half of 2026, more than the $7.3 billion it spent in all of 2025. It has also signed about $450 billion of cloud computing contracts over the next decade that cannot be cancelled. Those include $111 billion with Google Cloud Alphabet Inc. ↘ 1.62%, $110 billion with Amazon Web Services Amazon.com, Inc. ↘ 0.10% and $31 billion with Microsoft ↗ 0.20%. The company says it could spend as much as $750 billion over the next few years to secure more capacity, including deals still being negotiated.wsj.com+1

The filing says Anthropic has asked for more capacity than the big cloud providers were willing to supply. That has pushed it toward data center projects built by third-party developers. About 20% of first-half revenue came from just two customers. The company expects a small group of clients to keep supplying a large share of its sales. The draft also warns about failures in AI model alignment and catastrophic incidents. It notes that damages from a severe AI-related security event could exceed the company's insurance coverage.uk.investing.com

Growth slows before listing

The prospectus comes days after Anthropic told investors that third-quarter revenue rose about 45% to $16.8 billion, up from $11.6 billion in the second quarter, according to The New York Times ↘ 1.01%. Revenue had grown 146% from the first quarter to the second, so the pace has slowed. Some investors at the October 14 investor day were disappointed and discussed a valuation of about $1.5 trillion, down from the $2 trillion that had been expected, Reuters reported. Anthropic was last valued at $965 billion in its May funding round.nytimes.com+1

A test for AI appetite

Barron's says the IPO, expected in November, will test how much investors want AI stocks, with slowing sales growth and recent setbacks for other listings raising the stakes. Anthropic must now show that a business growing this fast can justify its large and largely locked-in spending on computing power.barrons.com