Anthropic Is Betting Nearly $900 Billion That the AI Boom Won’t Bust

When Anthropic first filed its S-1, the initial registration statement that is required of any company that intends to become publicly traded, it left the most recent quarter of financial figures blank. On Monday, it started filling in those previously missing earnings, and you’ll be shocked to learn that it shows the company spending a lot more than it earns. First, the glass-half-full view for the AI optimists: Anthropic reported about $17 billion in third-quarter revenue, according to a report from Bloomberg. That’s a massive jump from the $1.4 billion the company reported during the same period last year, suggesting it has found substantial demand for Claude, particularly among businesses paying to use its AI models. The rest of the report, though, doesn’t so much evoke a “glass-half-empty” perspective as it makes you think the glass has been pushed off the table and shattered on the floor. Despite ramping up revenue by nearly 12x over just one year, Anthropic posted a $23.3 billion net loss during the same period that it reported that massive revenue growth. That’s nearly double the net loss the company posted during the third quarter of 2025, when it reported a $12.1 billion loss. The more investment-pilled among us will point out that much of that loss is linked to a change in the “fair value” cost of convertible notes issued by the company, which have increased because the valuation of the company keeps going up. And true as that might be, there’s also still a reason that Anthropic opted to hold off on sharing its Q3 figures. Growth slowed compared to the quarters before it, and its actual operating expenses continue to climb. The company also flipped back into the red on operating costs after briefly going positive the previous quarter. No wonder it wanted Q2 in investors’ heads first when declaring plans to go public before slipping in the more disappointing third quarter into the document. Significantly more interesting than the quarter-by-quarter figures, though, is Anthropic’s long-term position. According to the company’s amended S-1, it has $895 billion in financial commitments, primarily tied to Anthropic’s endless hunger for compute power. The company says about $214 billion of those commitments are subject to termination rights or conditions that must be met before they take effect. Another $100 billion in commitments was added in October alone, and about half of the total commitments will come due by 2030. Anthropic’s compute cravings certainly feel unsustainable, and it’s possible that it’s already overcommitted. Per the New York Times, Anthropic’s bankers have floated the possibility of raising more than $100 billion in its IPO—roughly the same amount the company has added to its compute spending commitments since the end of September alone. Just last week, banks and investment firms announced a $63 billion financing deal to purchase Broadcom chips and other equipment that will be leased to Anthropic. Per the Times, Anthropic has basically hit up all of Silicon Valley looking for space on their server racks, tossing hundreds of billions to companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. It’s also rented data center space from SpaceX (despite that company’s CEO, Elon Musk, calling Anthropic “evil”), so-called “neocloud” upstarts offering compute, and has even started to ask cryptomining companies to stand up some servers for them. Those commitments, now spread out among dozens of companies, are a much bigger long-term bet than the revenue Anthropic can count on generating from its customers—and the company has yet to demonstrate that it can consistently turn an operating profit. So costs will keep climbing, growth is already starting to taper off, and going public will only exacerbate the pressure to turn those red numbers on its books black. That feels a little harder to explain away than the convertible notes.