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Anthropic opened its proverbial kimono this week, so today we’re taking a look at the cold hard numbers and running a health check on one of the largest frontier AI companies in the world.
First, a quick detour.
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AI IS GETTING CHEAPER, YET ANTHROPIC'S MAKING MORE MONEY 💰
AI equities have had a rough October, with chip stocks falling almost 19% in the two weeks after the S&P 500's Oct 6 record.
Much of that selling has been centered around the worry that AI will only continue to get cheaper, causing companies to spend less on intelligence.
On Monday, we got some hard numbers to test that worry, thanks to Anthropic’s newly filed S-1 (the document a company hands the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission before an IPO).
It plans to list on the Nasdaq as ANT, with the filing putting its net revenue retention (how much existing customers spend now vs a year ago) at ~900%.
That means customers who were already paying a year ago now spend ~9x as much, and more than 1,900 of them pay Anthropic $1M+ a year.
(That’s some insane growth!)
Anthropic did $16.3B of revenue in the first half of 2026, up from $1.16B in the same stretch last year - and $11.6B of that came in Q2 alone. 👇
The scariest number in the filing is an $80.7B net loss for the half, though ~$72B of that is an accounting charge.
Anthropic raised money through convertible notes (loans that turn into shares later), and as its valuation climbed, so did the paper value of what it owes those lenders.
Strip that out, and Q2 was Anthropic's first quarter with an operating profit of nearly $1B, while bringing in $3.9B of operating cash flow over the half.
Problem is, the price worry still holds up…
Ramp (a corporate card company that tracks what businesses spend on AI) found that token spending barely grew in August and September, even as companies used more AI.
Its blended token price fell 25.4% in four weeks to Oct 11.
Growth is cooling too: Reuters reports Anthropic told investors that Q3 revenue came in at $16.8B, up 45% from Q2, after more than doubling the quarter before.
That's one reason talk of a ~$2T IPO valuation has reportedly slipped to ~$1.5T.
But cheaper AI also gets used a lot more…
Anthropic's token volume on OpenRouter (a marketplace developers use to access AI models) is up 3.6x since it launched Opus 5.5 in September.
And after those two flat months, Ramp's weekly data has token spending up 23% vs a month earlier.
Anthropic is also making more from every dollar it spends on compute. It now brings in $2.08 of revenue per $1 of compute, up from $0.40 in Q1 2025.
Melvin (one of our PRO analysts) thinks that's why cheaper AI won't shrink the infrastructure bill.
(Lower prices → more ways to use AI → more users → more compute needed.)
Anthropic still can't get enough of it, agreeing to pay SpaceX ~$3.1B a month once all its contracted capacity is delivered, with its named compute deals adding up to roughly $637B.
That's why Melvin and Vincent (another of our PRO analysts) both came away from the filing more bullish on the companies selling Anthropic the picks and shovels: memory, networking and power.
But Vincent still won't buy the IPO.
Seven co-founders keep 50.1% of the vote through a single share, so public shareholders get almost no say in how Anthropic spends its money.
He also expects the stock to run and then drop hard, like SpaceX did.
Long story longer: token prices are falling, and so far usage is climbing fast enough to more than make up for it.
The next check on this theory comes tonight, when Microsoft and Alphabet report how fast their cloud businesses grew in Q3.
After that, we have Anthropic's roadshow (where it pitches big investors ahead of listing) reportedly kicking off the week of Nov 9.
Mark your calendars.
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