Anthropic has filed to go public – and its S-1 filing arguably shows that the cloud hyperscalers have it bent over a barrel. Here are 5 key takeaways.
1: Big losses > accounting artifacts
Anthropic reported a net loss of $81 billion in the six months to June 30 2026. The vast majority of this ($72 billion) was not cash-burn.
The bulk of reported losses were effectively due to accounting charges.
i.e. the more valuable the notes held by its investors become as Anthropic itself became more valuable, the bigger this “loss” gets. (These will not show up in the same way in its filings when Anthropic goes public.)
Its revenues for the same period were $16 billion.
Compute and infrastructure OpEx was $8.9 billion for H1.
The company’s underlying operating loss was $693 million in the first half. That’s a sharp improvement from its $2.1 billion in H1 2025.
It has a runway of around ~12 months based on current cash and credit lines. ($112.4 billion of cash and cash equivalents and $19.3 billion of short-term investments.) This would “support working capital, operating and finance lease payments, and capital expenditure requirements for at least the next 12 months,” the S-1 filing showed.
2: Colossal spending commitments
Anthropic is locked into some eye-watering spending commitments with cloud infrastructure providers (i.e. for access to GPU compute.) It has to honour these, “regardless of actual use” downstream, it noted.
- It has agreed to pay SpaceXAI $120.5 billion by 2029.
- It has agreed to pay Google $114 billion by 2033
- It has agreed to pay AWS $110 billion by 2036.
- It has agreed to pay Microsoft $44.9 billion by May 2033.
Referring to the AWS deal, Anthropic said: “Our commitment under such agreement is non-cancelable except in the event of Amazon’s uncured material breach.” The others appear to have the same clause.
Its biggest spending commitment in the prospectus is for data centre hardware, with Broadcom: “$161.2 billion excluding interest” it said.
3: At the mercy of the hyperscalers?
Anthropic admits in its S-1 that it is very, very exposed on compute.
“The market for compute is intensely competitive. We compete for access to compute with some of the world’s largest and most well-capitalized technology companies, many of which develop their own competitive AI models and have significantly greater financial resources than us.”
See also: Tesco swaps VMware for Proxmox
Anthropic cautioned of these rivals in its filing that “many own and operate cloud computing data center infrastructure, maintain captive chip manufacturing or design capabilities, have long-standing strategic relationships with key hardware suppliers, or have significant equity investments from, or other financial arrangements with, such suppliers.
"These competitors can outbid us for scarce compute, secure priority allocations from chip manufacturers and CSPs, and make long-term capital commitments that we cannot match,” Anthropic said.
4: Compute efficiency is improving, sharply
Anthropic’s revenue grew 1,368% in the three months to June, whilst compute and infrastructure expenses grew 300% year-on-year.
Its efforts to drive compute efficiency will be central to slashing those losses.
Anthropic said it will “lower the cost per task for customers" and is already making good headway: "Claude Opus 5.5 reduced customer costs per task by approximately 40% compared to Claude Opus 5.”
5: Going public, but with 7 founders in charge
Anthropic’s seven co-founders will retain 50.1% of voting power, by issuing a “single share of Class F common stock… to a limited liability company of which our seven co-founders will initially be the sole members.
It is calling this the “Founder LLC” it said.
It will be considered a “controlled company” under Nasdaq’s corporate requirements and "permitted to opt out of compliance with certain Nasdaq Global Select Market corporate governance requirements."
This would mean, among other things, that Anthropic will not be required to have a nominating/corporate governance committee composed entirely of independent directors or independent oversight of director nominations.
Its novel corporate governance structure “has no direct public company precedent,” Anthropic boasted in its filing. This will have the “effect of limiting the likelihood of an unsolicited merger proposal, unsolicited tender offer, or proxy contest for the removal of directors,” it said.
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