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  trjordan
  Everything comes back to whether the demand is really there.Anthropic thinks it is. The got the demand / datacenter match right in Q2, got great margins, and committed hard.They've got:- $114b committed to Google- $110b committed to AWS- $161b committed to Broadcom- $120b committed to SpaceXIf the party continues, they'll go from $50b in revenue to $500b and be fine.But if they don't, it's going to hurt. And that's their only choice, because otherwise, they end up with a frontier model and 50% of the capacity and get eviscerated on either availability or last-minute datacenter leases.It's a big business, but it's not an easy business.
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  rich_sasha
  One thing that bothers me is that if the AI maximalism turns out correct (which is needed to justify the valuations), why would AI companies respect money and ownership?So far, even major disruptions were still affecting relatively small segments of the economy. Car lobby in Germany, tech in the US, "Big Pharma/Food/etc”. They needed the rest of the economy.But if some AI company figures out a way to monopolize everything: new companies, old companies, physical manufacturing - all the things they say they will, please buy here for lots of money - why would they be bound to pay out dividends or otherwise share the fruits of their economic labour?I’m not saying specifically Anthropic would be looking to screw its investors. Rather, if you control an almost omnipotent genie, wouldn’t the temptation just be too much?Or temptation aside - will money even have any value? If some AI company rebuilds the economy from scratch, and control everything from accounting to shoe making, why would they respect the value of some fiat tokens? It’d be like the conquistadors respecting the shells and beads of their new Aztec subjects.Of course, perhaps none of this happens, but then the question is, how good an investment all of this even is.
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  cmiles8
  There are a lot of parallels to the WeWork S1. They’ve made absolutely massive forward cash commitments, on a business that’s increasingly commoditized, and with little hard evidence that they’ll generate the revenue (let alone the cashflow) to pay for all these future liabilities. All while everyone is discovering there isn’t really a secret sauce moat to demand much of a a premium over cheaper options that trade a few points above the direct COGS (cost of compute in this case).If everything goes just perfect they might eek by. If it doesn’t this goes from high flying startup to insolvency and bankruptcy real fast.
• LarsDu88
  I think a lot of discussion around the sucess or failure of Anthropic and OpenAI seems to hinge on their current uses, but people seem to have amnesia regarding the fact that Claude code wasn't even a thing until about 1 year ago. There are far wider markets these companies can tap on if they are well capitalized even as Chinese "actually open AI" commoditizes things.There are moonshot projects related to superconductors, materials, and biology that these companies can claim progress on to keep valuations stratospheric.
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  informal007
  | Quarter | Revenue (USD billions) | QoQ Growth || Q1 2026 | 4.731 | +131.9% || Q2 2026 | 11.555 | +144.1% || Q3 2026 | 16.800 | +45.4% |The growth rate slowed in the latest quarter, which I think is why they decided to go public now.
• ponkpanda
  The main question is now much of that ~USD 80bn of other expenses should be really be included in 2026 operating costs. It cuts to whether frontier inference is actually cashflow profitable.If you take equity from Amazon and Google whereby the terms of that investments requires you to "spend" the investment in those investor's respective clouds, it's potentially a rather neat way of obfuscating your real level of profitability. Perhaps Anthropic only spent that equity on training rather than inference runs.This is the circular financing that has been discussed widely in the press. It makes it very difficult for an outsider to really understanding whether the firm and by extension the other frontier labs are profitable.
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  kikdij
  For those who are not familiar with S-1: this document is incredibly important. this is one of the rare times in the life of a company where it's not allowed, by law, to lie, nor to omit the truth.
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  guitarlimeo
  They must be joking with this part:"Before starting the IPO process, we spoke to many business leaders who had gone through a similar process in the past. One piece of advice, which we heard in slightly different forms from multiple people, stuck with us: never let your company be worth a dollar more than it is actually worth. What they meant is that it is very dangerous when people buy your company's stock based on expectations you cannot fulfill or on incorrect predictions about how you will behave. This is in fact very similar to one of Anthropic's guiding principles: underpromise and overdeliver."
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  jialatsia
  Ant generates $2.08 in revenue for every $1 spent on compute which is up from just $0.40 in Q1 2025.the payback period for compute is just insane, likely less than a year!
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  6thbit
  > We believe the work that knowledge workers perform represented more than $40 trillion (in 2025) (...)our near-term opportunity is to expand this value ...investment in AI (...) will yield a cumulative global economic impact of $22.5 trillion by 2031 We believe the impact could be even greater. While they don't seem to explicitly mention total addressable market (TAM) Is that their way of saying their TAM sits somewhere between 22.5 and 40 T?
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  deepwoods
  About a quarter of Anthropic's revenue for the nine months ended 9/30/26 came from just five customers. That's not an absurd concentration, but I would be very interested to know who they are and how mobile their business is. From a financial perspective, the lack of moat seems like the whole ballgame, particularly because they're getting ~80% of their revenue from consumption-based spending.
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  npilk
  So at the moment they claim to be making an operating profit if you exclude:- Stock-based compensation expenses- Non-cash charitable contribution expensesBoth seem fairly reasonable to exclude (although it depends how much of the stock compensation is for executives... you can't necessarily pay people with stock forever).FMost of the loss is non-operating losses, and it all seems to be weird accounting recognition of changes in value of their stock, SAFEs, etc. - just "paper" losses.So the financial picture looks a lot better than I would have guessed - I suppose because they aren't the ones investing all this capex.
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  afavour
  Feels like being asked to invest in IBM just as other manufacturers started releasing the first PC compatible machines.Immediate term Anthropic, OpenAI rule the roost. But this is a very new technology and open models are already looking good. They’ll only get better. Is it realistic to think Anthropic will stay ahead of them enough to justify the valuation they’re asking for?
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  hn_submit
  This entire A.I. hype is going to get many people burned, especially those whom are investing for their pensions.And everyone is playing along. It seems to me half the internet is filled with false recommendations and overly optimistic outcomes of their software projects.And even if the claims are true what use will we have for hundreds of Microsoft Office clones? This A.I. boom might benefit some but will be the undoing of many valuable ISVs like Microsoft and Adobe with potentially trillions of stock market value lost.
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  tecleandor
  From the "Risk factors" section:> If the use of our AI models results in harm, whether through use by malicious actors or misuse by other third parties, or if our model guardrails or safeguards fail to prevent such misuse, our reputation and brand, business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.That shouldn't be an 'if'.Then, two paragraphs later...> For example, in September 2025, we detected and assessed with high confidence that a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group manipulated our Claude Code tool into attempting infiltration into roughly 30 global targets...But they should mention when the calls com from inside the house. :DInteresting to review all the mentions to China and Taiwan too.> The majority of the world’s most advanced chip manufacturing capacity is concentrated in Taiwan, primarily at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company [...] potential disruption from geopolitical tensions between Taiwan and China [...] Efforts to establish sufficient advanced chip manufacturing capacity outside of Taiwan, including in the United States, remain in early stages...
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  prolly97
  Adding a zero to revenue every year is wild. Regardless of whether you like Anthropic.
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  gradus_ad
  The killer app is AI coding. Claude Code had first mover advantage, was a genuine revolution, and has diffused through the industry with incredible speed. I would imagine most of the huge revenue increase over the last year is due almost entirely to AI coding spend.There are three issues with this. First, the rapid diffusion of the technology means it is very unlikely to continue at the rate of adoption seen over the past year, so it's very hard to extrapolate based on what we've seen so far. Second, many companies are reigning in AI budgets after an initial honeymoon phase. Third, all of the other labs are trying to take a bite of the coding pie, and the price war is already heating up.Add these simple dynamics up and it makes perfect sense why Anthropic would want to IPO now. Things look about as good as they ever will.
• anonu
  can't help but feel like the negativity in this thread will age like the AirBnB one or the DropBox one from the earlier era. but who is to know...
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  variety8675
  > there can be no assurance that we will be able to hire sufficient support personnel as and when needed, particularly if our sales exceed our internal forecastsWhy would they need support personnel? Isn't their whole point that Claude can do that
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  mrboatshoepants
  Anthropic is committed to $780-810 billion of mostly non-cancelable compute, payable "regardless of actual usage."
• alkonaut
  I'm just happy they aren't calling it "Super intelligence" in this document.
• basscodes
  shameless plug, get a properly paginated PDF here: https://enopdf.com/tools/edgar-to-pdf/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww...
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  turbobutton
  I wonder if we're already close to peak value at the foundation model/API level. With so many good open-weight models out there, I think more and more of the money will end up in the applications built on top. Unless companies like Anthropic can move into that space, I'm not sure I'd bet on them as long-term investments over the next 10–20 years.
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  billylo
  A different picture if you include Q3 data in their chart.https://x.com/billylo/status/2114730642881544285?s=20Q3 data from their pre-IPO investor roadshow.Dealroom / Wall Street Journal on Q3 data https://dealroom.co/news/164610-anthropics-draft-s-1-reveals...Bloomberg reported the same data. https://qz.com/anthropic-q3-revenue-adjusted-profit-ipo-inve...
• JohnMakin
  Can anyone ELI5 the Class T stock structure and the rights it has? It seems like it has the ability to govern itself, but other than that, not terribly a lot?
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  anotherengineer
  Really wonder how their public benefit mission will align with the expectations to maximize shareholder returnsI want to be optimistic, but I just can’t imagine the public benefit mission winning out in the market
• javier123454321
  Funny that they don't mention their publicly stated fear that AI has ~10% of wiping out humanity in their AI risks section.
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  helsinkiandrew
  It mentions "humanity" 21 times.
• akie
  This is it, we're at the summit. It's only downhill from here.
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  int32_64
  "If we fail to adequately protect our intellectual property rights, our competitive position may be impaired, and we may lose valuable assets, generate reduced revenue, and incur costly litigation to protect our rights, which may adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations."We scraped the entire internet but our business might not be viable if we get scraped too."We incorporate open-source software in our models, platform, and applications, which may subject us to litigation or other requirements, each of which may adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations."We violated GPL."We may be subject to claims that we or our employees have misappropriated the intellectual property of other companies, particularly as we hire employees from other AI and technology companies."We sniped employees from other labs that brought over IP.The whole risk section is insane frankly.
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  jawiggins
  The revenue growth rate is quite shocking. Their two worst quarters were Q425 and Q326 where they grew 47% and 45%. Other than those two, they've been growing >100% QoQ for two years. This company is about to list with some of the greatest revenue growth in the history of shareholder capitalism. I wasn't planning on investing before, but I think learning this has changed my mind.
• extraextra
  AI = Artificial Income
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  baq
  Amount of early money waiting to exit is absolutely staggering, wonder if there’s enough retail to buy the leftovers without crashing the price. Reminder everyone with money who wanted in before IPO got in!
• photon_collider
  What a historic moment! It'll be interesting to see how much Anthropic can continue growing.There will come a point where open-source models are good enough for most people. However, I do expect there to be demand for frontier models for things like cybersecurity (especially on the enterprise side) and scientific research.
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  epsteingpt
  $81B net loss in first 6 months of 2026 alone. Linked discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50243002
• therein
  Finally we can stop with their psyops?
• adverbly
  Not a great look they they can't correctly generate a PDF that renders without text overflowing and overlapping.
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  jstummbillig
  It seems obvious that the AI stocks are an interesting buy, but I wonder how other people feel about picking between Anthropic/OpenAI/Google here. Looks all fairly random, given the wild swings and interoperability of the technology so far.
• wesm
  The biggest question mark here for me is how much third party compute has been contributed in exchange for Anthropic equity. This has the effect of making Anthropic's compute spending look a lot lower than it actually is. Anthropic gets a revenue share on that third party compute spend (or gets to do training runs without spending cash), the third party gets shares in return.
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  jeanpah
  What happens if You lie in this form ? It there is líes how we can detect them? Is there a wait or someone from goverment audits this ?
• quantiq
  I'm tired boss.
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  alberth
  ~400 pages.How many folks use Claude to summarize.
• kovek
  Does this make it less likely that Anthropic will push for regulations?
• NordSteve
  The word "Oracle" isn't present in the document.
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  jedberg
  So you don't have to do the math, at a midline valuation of $1.7T, the Amodei's each will have about $25B. It mentions that they have pledged 80% of their stock to charity in a non-binding agreement.
• axus
  They didn't use AI to write the prospectus...
• anon
  undefined
• diavolodeejay
  $ANT ticker, it would have been funnier if it was $CLAUD
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  hisfraudulency
  So it looks like $2T is indeed the target
• sidcool
  This make me wonder how did XAI reach so much revenue so fast!
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  paaloeye
  This will be the most read S-1 in the decade
• anon
  undefined
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  lurker137
  I wonder if OpenAI will release theirs soon. It seems very important to be the first one to IPO
• hartator
  Fable 5.5?
• m3kw9
  It's very simple right? If they don't hit ant AI walls, the demand to use it to improve [stuff], will not stop. If AI maxes out for too long it's gonna be painful because the narrative is gonna hurt them more than anything.
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  ChaseRensberger
  this should be fun
• vcryan
  I don't participate in stock markets for personal reasons but if I did, I would be betting against Anthropic in the long term. This is a highly commoditized field and while they are a leader it's not clear than any of their attempts at vendor lock-in are working. They are certainly not working on me as I cancel and enable my subscription depending on the availability of capable lower-cost models.
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  quantumwoke
  This might be one of the most consequential S-1s in the next decade. There's a part of me that's terrified, like we're on the precipice of financial or societal collapse. I suppose that could be a sign of the times.
• somewhereoutth
  Rather curious to know what is hiding in the 8.7B 'other expenses'.Given that this is ~50% of revenue, it would have a huge bearing on how near real profitability Anthropic actually is.
• simianwords
  I'm surprised at people suggesting that the model layer can't be the moat. Having great models that are smart requires talent, culture and good judgement. Sure it can be commoditised to an extent but could it not be that Anthropic will always stay in the lead?They only have to be marginally better and there will be tonnes of people who will pay a lot of money to have that marginal intelligence.
• tsunamifury
  This IPO, if successful, will complete rewrite the standing rules of the stock market in ways incredibly harmful to the future of American style capitalism:1. The Separation of Economic Value and Corporate Governance creating The Multi-Class Autocracy2. Institutionalizing the "Off-Market Vault" that can manipulate stock price at any time3. The "Vendor-Financed" Public Offering (Circular Balance-Sheet Refinancing)4. Monetizing Non-Cash Derivative Liabilities as "Losses" Without Cash Burn
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  RemoteIsHeaven
  For all things good and holy, DO NOT purchase shares until things settle down and by that I don't mean next month, or next year but atleast 2028, IF you're doing so with the intention of enjoying an uplift.I know it sounds and feels like the only trajectory of this company is up but HN is an echo chamber of a tiny minority of the technical populace and 3 out of 5 people on the planet don't know what ChatGPT is.If you have the ability to lose all the money and can time the extreme volatility, have fun, but don't put anything you're going to rely on.This is also one of the companies we will look back at 2046 and wonder what we were thinking.
• lifeisloving
  Im going to continue to use fast open source models like Deepseek and GLM, I like most others, have zero need for the worlds smartest person to be my assistant.I dont understand this business model, it seems clearly unsustainable (at their prices). When people start to realize they dont need to spend all this money on turbo PhD intelligence so they can build react apps, Anthropic will be in a tough spot (if they already aren't).You will say, "but enterprise!!" Nope, plenty of companies are waking up to this reality as well. It turns out that if you made money pre-AI without spending 5k a seat a month for your engineers dev tools, you probably don't need to now to continue too.
• loveparade
  Can I get dividends as tokens?
• throwa356262
  I think a company like Moonshot or Z.AI could have sabotaged this behind repair by doing a 10-20B IPO before Anthropic.That could have popped the AI bubble right there.
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  Valakas_
  Where's the "It's a bubble" crowd now?
• jabedude
  Is becoming a public company going to help or harm their mission of delivering safe AI?
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  bix6
  Super shares yet again. Pass.Plus they get to dilute as value rises lol.
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  rvz
  We are nearing the final stages of the AI hype cycle and this IPO will cause the acceleration of the crash."AGI" was never mentioned once and it was you being the exit liquidity for the insiders and early investors.
• FLeXMurphy
  Waiting for the Ed Z. post, will be an interesting bit of spectacle to see.
• senordevnyc
  Wild that this has 500+ points and 500+ comments less than one hour after posting, and it's #11 on the homepage. Guessing either the flamewar detector or lots of AI skeptics flagging it?
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  throwaway85825
  'AI' still fails the alignment grannybench.
• kypro
  I seems to me the main risk long-term is that it's not clear where the moat is.People will pay a premium if there is marginal value in extra intelligence. And Anthropic is able to retain their lead and provide that extra intelligence.Both of these assumptions seem highly suspect to me. Most businesses don't exclusively hire PHD-level employees for most tasks because a competent slightly less intelligent/knowledgable person can do the job just fine for significantly less.Then there is the question of if they're able to retain their lead, and again, this seems questionable. Both OpenAI and Google are competing at the frontier, and Chinese labs are still in the race. Things are changing so fast who knows where we'll be in 5-10 years.My best guess is that longer-term models will be commoditised and it will be how companies offer products and services around their models that gives them their margins. I wouldn't bet on Anthropic's ability to do this. Meta, OpenAI and Google are much better placed to win here imo.The other place there may be margin is in niche research domains like drug-discovery. Any slight lead in these sectors could give them a lot of pricing power.I think the reason to invest in this is as a hedge. AI basically competes against everything and arguably for this reason it's risky to not own a basket of AI stocks.
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  rfgplk
  What's preventing me from feeding this into Claude and reconstructing the company for $200?I'm unironically doing this right now; downloaded the docs (htm + pdf render) to a local repo and running Opus 5.5 @ max effort with the prompt: "In this directory you can find Anthropics official S-1 filing, read it and replicate their corporate strategy, validate it via an adversarial subagent swarm and write up a detailed corporate plan for a startup copying their exact strategy. The goal is to achieve a $1 trillion valuation and an IPO in 5 years." Edit: I'm not even joking I got safeguard flagged for Details: `[cyber]`
• axegon_
  > Second, AI can be a powerful lever for economic growth. As a general purpose technology, it has the potential to raise productivity across every sector of the economy. Productivity growth in advanced economies has stagnated in recent decades, partly for structural reasons and partly because new ideas seem to be harder to find. AI could reverse this trend.Bloody hell!!!! Who comes up with such crap, seriously?
• j45
  The return to shareholders path is difficult and will only raise prices and enshittify things.
• anon
  undefined
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  tinyhouse
  Good for you if you have Anthropic shares! I have no clue how they keep their employees around once the 6 month lockup period ends. They all going to be multi-millionaires, either retire or leave to start something on their own.
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  protoman3000
  So now buy or sell?
• dhruvagoyal
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• dan_p
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• sarmedshafi
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• koolba
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• gilfoyle_7
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• Ryner001
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• hmate9
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• anon
  undefined
• hauju
  [flagged]
• 6stringmerc
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• technojunkie
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  monirmamoun
  This S-1 is a FRAUD because it PURPOSEFULLY excludes the potential market destroying-power of free/open-weight Chinese models as a risk factor.That's literally the #1 risk factor. They ignore it.This is a FRAUD document and it means we need to SHORT this overblown company.
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  amelius
  A sad day for mankind.
• lousken
  Lets burn it down to the ground!
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  nickysielicki
  > Additionally, open-weight or open-source AI models may capture a portion of the market for certain use cases, which could exert pricing pressure on our offerings or lead certain customers to adopt open-source alternatives for those use cases.“A portion of the market for certain use cases” meanwhile the top 5 models by token consumption on the day this is posted are all Chinese/open weight models.https://openrouter.ai/rankings#leaderboard-table