👀 Wall Street gets a peak inside Anthropic

Investors have been eager to peek under the hood of Anthropic ahead of its anticipated Wall Street debut, which could value the AI company at around $2 trillion.

The Wall Street Journal got their hands on an early draft of Anthropic’s hotly anticipated S-1, which paints a picture of a company with surging revenues but also sky-high compute costs and a medley of risk factors. Here are some highlights:

• Revenue is growing at an impressive rate: It reported $16.3 billion in revenue for the first half of this year, up from $1.1 billion in the same period a year earlier. 

• They are also spending a ton of money on compute. The company spent $9 billion on computing capacity and infrastructure in the first half of 2026, up from $2.3 billion spent on infrastructure during the same period in 2025. The company already agreed to pay $450 billion in cloud computing agreements over the next seven to ten years and it can’t back out of those. It warned it could potentially spend $750 billion “in the coming years,” per the Journal.

• It is in the red. The company reported a net loss of $80 billion during the first half of 2026, compared to a net loss of $13 billion a year earlier. Most of that loss is accounting charges; it still reported operating loss in H1 2026 but it was lower than the year before.

• Anthropic makes it very clear that it sees AI as a risky business. According to the Journal, “roughly a third” of the draft prospectus was dedicated to risk factors ranging from liability tied to potential data security incidents, models “blackmailing” people to the political risk tied to the backlash against data centers. 

• The CEO isn’t getting a Musk-sized pay day. Dario Amodei’s total compensation is $18 million, which is in line with the median pay for S&P 500 companies but less than many of his Big Tech peers.

The Takeaway: 

Anthropic’s numbers scooped by the Journal give a rare glimpse at the precise economics of running an AI company. 

The good news is Anthropic’s revenue, as of June 30,  is growing faster than its costs. The bad news is that its costs are really high. Anthropic needs to convince investors that its revenues are going to keep growing faster than its enormous spending commitments. 

But, as Bloomberg’s Parmy Olson recently pointed out, the price of building AI models keeps going up while the price tag on AI products keeps going down. Anthropic can't guarantee that its revenue will keep soaring, but it's already committed to paying hundreds of billions of dollars for computing power.

“That doesn’t necessarily mean a bursting bubble, but it does look like the real power increasingly lies with the companies that distribute and power the technology: cloud giants like Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.,” Olson wrote. 

— J. Edward Moreno

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