Anthropic’s $518 Billion AI Bill Raises Questions Ahead of IPO

Anthropic is growing faster than almost any company of its size, but reports about its confidential draft IPO prospectus suggest that its growth comes with major financial commitments that could concern even optimistic investors.

The company has yet to file its IPO prospectus publicly, and it has not confirmed any of the reported figures.

Start with revenue, which, according to Aljazeera, hit $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, up from $1.1 billion a year earlier, and then reached $16.8 billion in the third quarter alone, meaning one three-month stretch now rivals the entire first half.

Growth from one quarter to the next is cooling, though, so these numbers describe a fast-moving business rather than a guaranteed yearly pace.

The $80.7 billion loss for the same six months looks alarming, but roughly $72 billion of it is an accounting adjustment tied to how convertible notes are valued, which means it is not cash that left the company.

Strip it out and the loss shrinks to about $8.7 billion, still a real shortfall for a business that has not shown it can turn a profit, though a very different picture from the headline. 

Metric / Area	Reported Figure	Context & Analytical Takeaway
H1 2026 Revenue	$16.3B	Up ~15× year-over-year from $1.1B in H1 2025.
Q3 2026 Revenue	$16.8B	A single quarter now exceeds the entire previous half-year, though sequential growth rate is decelerating.
Reported Net Loss	$80.7B (H1 2026)	Headline distortion: ~$72B stems from non-cash accounting adjustments (convertible note revaluations).
Adjusted Cash Loss	~$8.7B (H1 2026)	Real cash burn shortfall; the core operational deficit remains substantial.

Running the models is also costly, with computing and infrastructure spending near $9 billion in that period, more than half of revenue.

The key figure to watch is $518 billion. According to Reuters, this is the minimum Anthropic has reportedly committed to pay Google, Amazon, and lessors of equipment linked to Broadcom over the next seven to ten years.

About 80% of that amount is payable even if Anthropic does not use the computing capacity.

Measured against first-half revenue at a yearly pace, roughly $32.6 billion, that bill is close to 16 times larger, and while revenue should keep climbing and the payments are spread across many years, the company has to grow substantially just to keep up with what it has already signed.

Valuation is another concern. Earlier reports put Anthropic’s potential listing at over $2 trillion, while some investors now estimate it at $1.5 trillion.

That would value the company at roughly 46 to 61 times its annual earnings, based on its first-half performance, leaving little room for the company to fall short of expectations.

The hopeful reading is that Claude becomes a standard tool for companies and software developers, with products like Claude Code bringing in steady recurring revenue as computing gets more efficient. 

A key concern is that competitors offer similar models at lower prices, which could force Anthropic to cut prices while its costs remain unchanged.

The risk is greater because nearly a quarter of its 2025 revenue came from just two customers, many of its customers are not locked into long-term contracts, but Anthropic’s own commitments largely are.

Once the public filing arrives, the things worth checking are how much cash the business actually generates, how the commitments are scheduled year by year, and whether the cost of serving each customer is falling.