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Anthropic reports $17B in Q3 revenue, commitments of $895B in revised S-1

Anthropic reports $17B in Q3 revenue, commitments of $895B in revised S-1

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Comments (208)

  • cmiles8
    Q3 numbers are not what you want to see heading into an IPO.Again the issue is not is Anthropic an amazing growth story. Zero would debate that.The issue is this is a probably $200-300B company pretending it’s a $2T company.Add to that the insane amount of committed spend, a high interest rate environment which means they’ll pay a painful premium to patch cashflow gaps, and a likely “junk” bond rating (per Friday’s news) and that’s why folks are concerned.It’s also just wrong to keep dismissing the paper losses from convertible notes as somehow not real losses. Once they are a public company this will be actual value taken away from existing public shareholders so they are legit losses not to be ignored. It’s like claiming equity based comp is free money… it’s not, you’re taking it out of the pockets of shareholders.
  • nonethewiser
    We desperately need to ground these discussions in actual numbers.This should help build some intuition and establish a baseline for what the $2T valuation means.If you buy at $2T Anthropic needs to be worth about $3T by 2030 for a normal market return. That's ~25x P/E and ~$120B/year of profit.That could be something like $400B of revenue at 30% net margins, $300B at 40%, or $600B at 20%.It would take 1.7x revenue growth a year to get from today’s $68B run-rate to $400B by 2030. Anthropic's current growth rate is ~4.7x a year. Anthropic doesn't need to maintain that, they basically just need to prevent it from absolutely collapsing and hope margins hold up against open weight models.You could look at this and say "yeah that's plausible" or "I highly doubt they achieve that" but it's hyperbolic to say its actually impossible they can meet this valuation, definitive proof of bubble, cant be worth this unless they can create God, etc.
  • minimaxir
    From a financial analyst on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/peark.es/post/3mzdkyxzzns2w> Okay so Q3 ARR at $67.8bn versus $46.2bn for Q2, +47% QoQ. Turns out tokenmaxxing's end over the summer slowed revenue growth versus an absolutely torrid 100%+ growth rate in Q1/Q2 but 46% sequential is still eye-popping> Operating margins (GAAP) went from 8% to -3$, with a -28.5% QoQ incremental operating margin. $SPCX compute coming online is the reason.> Bottom line after seeing this Q3 update: the basic takeaways from the original S-1 don't change, but fears that they were excluding Q3 because it was a disaster were definitely wrong. Do with this information what you will.It's also worth noting that Q3 only has one week of Opus 5.5 (9/22 - 9/30) which may have changed the economics for Q4.
  • wongarsu
    Interesting. Their revenue has "only" gone up 47% in Q3, compared to doubling revenue in most previous quarters. Meanwhile their "compute and infrastructure" cost has increased by 77% compared to Q2Maybe they tried too hard to get good Q2 numbers, making revenue happen earlier and expenses later, and that now makes Q3 look worse? Either way, this does not look great
  • fooker
    The sentiment they are trying extraordinarily hard to create is that in the long run Anthropic will be the only one with any AI worth anything.That makes any loss or risk reasonable.It's great propaganda, so great that they have themselves started believing it with certainty. This is one of the self owns that brought down the USSR :)Of course they could be correct too, time will tell.
  • AJRF
    I like keeping an eye on OpenRouters view of the market: https://openrouter.ai/rankings#market-shareSince the start of the year the market has shifted from 50/50 split (closed v open weights) to 30/70 (70% of usage they see through their platform - is now open weight)DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 sees 5x the weekly token usage through OpenRouter than the closest closed weight model (GPT-6 Luna)Even though OpenRouter is only one limited view of the market - those trends should be worrying to potential investors.
  • kjuulh
    I am not sure how the IPO is going to go.Tokens themselves are already a bit of a commodity, and the margins are gonna be fierce on these as there is not a whole lot of lock in.Would Anthropic and OpenAI position themselves using their extra tools, their ai agents, presentations, docs. Are they nice; yes. However, that doesn't make a 2T company. It reminds me a bit of Dropbox, a truly great product, however, they're differentiation is simply not there. I think the momentum is there for the IPO to go decent, but it feels like the company is on such unstable ground that the fallout could be catastrophic.
  • loveparade
    Surprised these financials are not too dangerous to release.
  • aurareturn
    If OpenRouter is a proxy, then their growth will pick up again in Q4: https://openrouter.ai/anthropicIn Q3, I think they struggled with the government ban on Mythos/Fable, Opus 5 not being so good, OpenAI models being more token efficient, and they decided to dedicate a higher percentage of compute to training.
  • wongarsu
    Direct link to the prospectus: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2130357/000162828026...Consolidated financials are on page 23, quarterly numbers on page 160
  • camdenreslink
    Net loss of $23b in the third quarter is pretty bad right? Was that also due to the fair value of convertible notes?
  • epsteingpt
  • rtlptt
    The company is worth $200B at best. Where is the growth going to come from?Claude has been pushed into every software org possible already by force. Companies will evaluate the actual benefits in 2027 and usage will go down.There is no other product. It remains to be seen how long investment banks and influencers can spin the narrative.
  • sensanaty
    Why do they have to go with the ridiculous gazillion dollar valuations? Is it really such a bad thing to be valued at "only" 400B or whatever more realistic number, why does it have to be in the trillions?
  • 100111011111
    I have yet to see anyone releasing a nuanced report on all the metrics involved, everything I've found is short term or incomplete or misinformation, I am neutral, but the matter is complicated, they might pull it off, despite all the misleading marketing and Chinese competition and data center obstacles.Too much sensationalist reports out there, cherry picked by all sides.
  • andrewjneumann
    And still, so called stock owners get no voting rights.
  • SlightGenius
    the revised S-1 behind that $895B commitments figure says nine of the ten largest pharma cos, so it seems interesting that's what they seem to be basing off of
  • thisismyopinion
    No wonder when they're STEALING ALL THE CONTENT.
  • anon
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  • exceptione
    See also: Ant: Can unprecedented revenue growth outrun irresponsibly large investment? <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50326281#50335632>
  • SpicyLemonZest
    > It reported a $104 billion net loss during the period, though most of that was due to the change in fair value of convertible notes and derivative liabilities.Look, I've seen and I understand the arguments that the GAAP income adjustment for this kind of thing is fake, but a number of them seemed to take it for granted that it was a "one-time" adjustment. If it's going to keep happening I really feel like we ought to insist on a more comprehensive argument. The accounting principle must be generally accepted for a reason: what shenanigans could someone get up to by reporting net income without this adjustment, and how do we know Anthropic is not getting up to those shenanigans?
  • anon
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  • anon
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  • hmokiguess
    Release the weights instead
  • brcmthrowaway
    Anyone with successful portfolios here - should a retail pleb invest?
  • SlightGenius
    [flagged]
  • ddk_
    [dead]
  • 12329381
    Half of the revenue in the first 9 months of 2026 was in Q3? No one is going to believe that. Focus on the net loss of $23.29 billion in Q3, that's more instructive.