Anthropic IPO: Big questions S-1 leaves unanswered

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Anthropic’s more than 300-page S-1 application filed earlier this week contained a lot of information. This was the most comprehensive public statement yet on how pure AI labs make money.

After the prospectus was released on Monday, my US-based colleagues and I took a close look and carefully considered everything from returns and risks to competitors and computing costs.

The filing also revealed that CEO Dario Amodei and six of his co-founders each own more than 200 million shares, potentially worth billions of shares if Anthropic reaches its expected valuation of more than $1 trillion.

But despite all the nuggets, some big questions remain.

Anthropic reported cost of revenue for the first half of 2026 of $2.38 billion. This translates to a gross profit margin of 85% on revenue of $16.29 billion over the same period.

Violeta Todorova, senior research analyst at Leverage Shares, asked CNBC whether first-half sales could grow enough to “meet expectations,” compared to just $1.16 billion in the first half of 2025.

“As computing demand increases, it is unclear how much it will cost to generate additional revenue,” she said.

But Anthropic’s impressive revenue growth slowed in the third quarter. Compared to the first quarter, the second quarter saw an increase of approximately 144%, followed by the third quarter with an increase of approximately 47%.

“What we didn’t see in the prospectus was management’s expectations for successive slowdowns in growth,” said Michael Field, chief equity strategist at Morningstar.

“Substantially all of the cost of revenue” relates to computing and infrastructure costs, the filing states. The company also said operating margins and adjusted operating margins are expected to “fluctuate over time, particularly during times when significant incremental computing is delivered and associated costs are incurred.”

“Investors can understand that compute as a percentage of revenue is declining, but they don’t know how much of that forward commitment will be allocated to training next-generation models rather than servicing customers,” Nick Patience, AI lead at Futurum Group, told CNBC. “That split will determine future margins.”

Questions also remain about whether computing costs can continue to fall at a faster pace than increases in commitments and whether Anthropic will have enough capacity to serve its customers, he added.

With demand outstripping supply across the AI ​​and hyperscaler space, the prospectus notes that the company previously required “more compute from[cloud service providers]than its partners were willing to provide.”

It went on to say, “We have historically operated in a compute-constrained environment where computing demand exceeds available supply.”

Anthropic’s structure as a public benefit corporation also raises questions. The seven co-founders, including CEO Dario Amodei, have special voting rights with one Class F share representing 50.1% of the total voting power on matters submitted to shareholder vote.

Anthropic said in its filing that its capital and corporate governance structure “has no precedent for a direct public company.”

“We also see that management is planning a series of different class stock issues,” Morningstar’s Field said. “But what we don’t know is whether investors will just accept the implied lack of control or whether this will affect the stock price. That’s something we won’t know until the stock starts trading.”

And finally, the trillion-dollar question: Anthropic’s targeted IPO valuation. AI Lab is keeping that secret for now. It simply states that it “will be determined by negotiations between us, the selling stockholders, and our representatives.”

This would be a huge market event, given that analysts’ forecasts range from $1 trillion to $2 trillion. If it’s at the higher end of the range, it could regain some of the prestige the AI ​​sector has lost in recent weeks. If you’re in the lower ranks, things can get worse.

Anthropic’s S-1 was a treasure trove of company information, but one number caught my eye. AI Labs has more cash than almost every company in the United States. And, as my colleague Leslie Picker writes, no company has ever gone public with so much money.