Anthropic is planning an IPO and filed their draft S-1 prospectus in June! They were circulating that draft S-1 around their investors last month. And it leaked to Reuters, who wrote it up. [Reuters; Reuters; Reuters] Anthropic’s money situation is as bad as we thought. Actual revenue in 2025 was…
Annons
Annons
Anthropic is planning an IPO and filed their draft S-1 prospectus in June! They were circulating that draft S-1 around their investors last month. And it leaked to Reuters, who wrote it up. [Reuters; Reuters; Reuters] Anthropic’s money situation is as bad as we thought. Actual revenue in 2025 was $4.6 billion. Just the operating expenses were $12.65 billion, for an operating loss of $8 billion. They spent $2.75 to make each dollar that came in. Even then, that revenue number is just a little cooked, if strictly according to GAAP: Anthropic books the full value of marketplace contracts — sales agreements where customers buy access to Claude through a cloud provider’s marketplace — as revenue because it sets prices and delivers the service, while recording the platforms’ cut as a marketing cost. Anthropic lists $518 billion in deals it’s committed to over the next 10 years. 80% of those, they can’t back out of. Can you service over $400 billion in hard liabilities with just $5 billion in revenue? I’m not convinced. That $518 billion total liability figure includes deals for $111 billion with Google, $110 billion with Amazon, and $31 billion with Microsoft. There’s also $161 billion of equipment leases with Broadcom that can’t be cancelled — and up to $84 billion for Nvidia rigs to go in Anthropic’s rented space in xAI. The risk section is about a third of the S-1. Anthropic includes the existential risks of AI turning us all into paperclips in the serious money document. But Anthropic’s promoted their alleged killer AI so much in public that they couldn’t really skip it. There are also more regular risks. Like how nearly a quarter of Anthropic’s revenue in 2025 came from just two customers. They don’t say who those two customers are, but 47% of Anthropic’s sales go through Amazon and Google. Anthropic warns how many of its largest clients are not locked into long-term contracts and could drop Anthropic in a moment. All these revenue and liability figures are the numbers that went through proper auditing for the S-1. You’ll notice these are not the alleged tens of billions in annualised revenue or run rates or other non-standard made-up numbers that Anthropic throws around whenever they can. Anthropic’s been touting “adjusted” revenues for the past two quarters, saying they’re now in profit. Hooray? I was joking a couple of weeks ago about how you could take your best single day, multiply it by 365, and call that your annualised recurring revenue. But there’s a rumour that Anthropic did precisely that — they multiplied 31 July by 365 and called that their annual recurring revenue! I can’t establish if it was actually Anthropic who did that or just one of their more optimistic investors. But this is why we have standardised accounting and why you want audited numbers. What’s notably missing in this S-1 is any audited numbers for 2026. Anthropic should have the data, if they can tout made-up versions. If actual revenue for 2026 was going to end up much higher than 2025, they’d have said so. Anthropic needs AI revenues to go way up. There isn’t a sign of that. And their liabilities are only getting bigger. Anthropic will likely run the IPO in mid-November, right after the mid-term elections. They’re hoping to take on the order of $100 billion, for a valuation of $2 trillion. That’s over 400 times their 2025 revenue. [Bloomberg] That will make Anthropic big enough it’ll go straight into the stock indexes — the same way SpaceX did. So the final suckers are the pension funds, who buy into the indexes. That is, you! The good news is, some pension funds are avoiding the AI hot air. New York City Retirement Systems is actively avoiding yet more AI exposure. Teacher Retirement System of Texas is advising caution. So call your pension fund and express your concerns. [Bloomberg, archive; PitchBook] Video — Podcast