This report is from this week’s The Tech Download newsletter. Do you like what you see? You can subscribe here. Anthropic’s more than 300-page S-1 filing earlier this week contained a lot of information. It was the most comprehensive public statement to date on how an AI lab makes money. After the prospectus was published on Monday, my US-based colleagues and I reviewed it closely, detailing everything from revenue and risks to competitors and computing costs. The filing also revealed that CEO Dario Amodei and his six co-founders each own more than 200 million shares, which could be worth billions if Anthropic reaches the expected $1 trillion-plus valuation. But despite After All the Nuggets, some important questions remain. The Anthropic logo is displayed on a smartphone, with a page from the company’s website about its initial public offering (IPO) filing in the background, in Creteil, France, on October 27, 2026. Samuel Boivin | Nurfoto | Getty ImagesRevenueAnthropic reported that its cost of revenue was $2.38 billion in the first half of 2026, recording $16.29 billion in revenue during the same period and implying a gross margin of 85%. Violeta Todorova, senior research analyst at Leverage Shares, told CNBC that first-half revenue compares with just $1.16 billion in the first half of 2025, and asked if they could grow to “keep pace.” “It’s unclear how much it costs to generate each additional dollar of revenue as computing demand increases,” he said. But Anthropic’s meteoric revenue growth slowed in the third quarter. It grew by approximately 144% in the second quarter compared to the first quarter, followed by approximately 47% in the third quarter. “What the prospectus didn’t tell us is management’s expectations around the sequential slowdown in the growth rate,” said Michael Field, chief equity strategist at Morningstar. Computing “Substantially all of the cost of revenue” is associated with computing and infrastructure costs, the document states. It also says that operating margin and adjusted operating margin are “expected to fluctuate over time, particularly in periods when we are delivered substantial incremental computing and incur associated expenses.” “Investors may see the decline in computing as part of revenue, but not how much of future commitment is going into training the next generation of models rather than serving customers,” Nick Patience, AI lead at Futurum Group, told CNBC. “That division dictates future margins.” Questions also remain about whether computing costs can continue to fall faster than commitments grow and whether Anthropic can secure enough capacity to serve customers, he added. Regarding sector-wide demand for AI and hyperscalers outstripping supply, the prospectus says it had previously sought “computing quantities of [cloud service providers] more than those partners were willing to offer.” It later says, “We have historically operated in a limited computing environment in which computing demand has exceeded the supply available to us.” Its capital structure and corporate governance has “no direct public company precedent,” in the filing. “We also know now that management plans a series of stock issuances of different classes,” Morningstar’s Field said. “But what we don’t know is whether investors will be okay with the implied lack of control, or whether this will affect the stock price. Something we won’t know until the stock starts trading.” And finally, the trillion-dollar question: the valuation of the IPO Anthropic is targeting. The AI Lab is staying mum on the matter, for now. It says simply that it will be “determined by negotiations between us, the selling shareholders and the representatives.” The swagger that the AI sector has lost in recent weeks, if it’s on the lower end, things could get ugly. News Edit One more thing The S-1 of Anthropic was a treasure trove of company information, but one figure really caught my attention. The AI Lab has more cash than almost every company in the U.S. And, as my colleague Leslie Picker writes, never before has a company gone public with so much money.
