For five years, nobody outside knew exactly how much Anthropic, the company behind the Claude assistant, was earning and spending. Like any unlisted company, it had no obligation to publish its accounts.
This week, the veil lifted.
Where these figures come from
Anthropic is preparing its stock market listing. In June, the company filed a draft confidential document with the US stock market regulator. This document, known as an "S-1", must set out in detail the company's finances and risks before its shares are offered to the public. According to the press, the listing could take place as early as November, with a target valuation of up to $2 trillion.
The Wall Street Journal was able to consult this draft. One important caveat: it is not yet the final public document, and some figures may change.
Dizzying growth
In the first half of 2026, Anthropic generated $16.3 billion in revenue. A year earlier, over the same period, it was $1.1 billion. Sales have therefore multiplied by nearly fifteen in a year. Over the whole of 2025, they reached around $4.6 billion.
Few companies in history have seen such acceleration.
A record loss, mostly on paper
At the same time, Anthropic reports a net loss of $80.7 billion over six months, against $13 billion a year earlier. The figure is spectacular, but it needs explaining.
According to the newspaper, around $72 billion of that loss comes from an accounting entry linked to convertible bonds, that is, loans that can turn into shares. When a company's value soars, the value those shares will have soars too, and accounting rules require it to be recorded as a loss. But no money actually left the coffers for that part.
The loss linked to the business itself is therefore much smaller. It is still real, however: computing costs came to around $9 billion over the half-year.
In the United States, a company that wants to list first files a document, often in complete confidence, with the SEC, the stock market regulator. After several rounds of back and forth, it must make that document public at least fifteen days before setting out to meet investors on a presentation tour known as a "roadshow". It is at the end of that tour that the share price is set, just before the first day of trading. The public document is often several hundred pages long, and the company must set out in detail all the risks it faces.
Colossal commitments
This may be the most dizzying figure of all: Anthropic has committed to spending around $450 billion on computing power with the major cloud providers over the next seven to ten years, including around $111 billion with Google and $110 billion with Amazon.
These commitments reflect the whole industry's bet: ever more compute will be needed to build ever more powerful models. But they raise a question, at a time when the great American data centre build-out is starting to crack: what happens if growth slows?
The risks to watch
Dependence on a handful of customers. According to the document, around a fifth of revenue comes from just two customers. If one of them cuts its spending, the impact would be immediate.
Competition. Google, Meta and Microsoft have all just released or finished new frontier models. The race allows no let-up.
Regulation and incidents. Anthropic is among the companies questioned by Europe after the summer's incidents, and the legal risks across the sector are worrying even insurers.
The takeaway
Anthropic's accounts tell the story of all frontier AI: revenues exploding, and spending exploding even faster. Investors will have to decide whether this race to the top will eventually become profitable.
If the deal is confirmed, it could be one of the largest stock market listings in history. Above all, it will be a real-world test: a test of the markets' confidence in the artificial intelligence economy.