Anthropic's Sprint to IPO: The Gap Between a $637 Billion Compute Commitment and $65 Billion ARR

"King of AI" Anthropic Works for Musk, Jensen Huang and Others

Shudushe October 28, 2026 09:08:57

Anthropic is a phenomenal company in a phase of rapid expansion. It operates in an industry that may determine the course of humanity, and it is the king of that industry, so its valuation is destined not to be low. But this king has overdrawn its future revenue, and its lead is not eternal. Now is the best time to go public.

Author | Lu Suo

Editor | Jin Xiao

In Anthropic's prospectus, the U.S. tech giants may be the biggest winners.

In the risk disclosures, Anthropic mentions the "take-or-pay" model of cooperation with the giants, that is, an agreed minimum payment amount regardless of actual usage.

The prospectus mentions approximately $637 billion in compute commitments. Among them, Broadcom, SpaceX, Google, and Amazon all reach the hundred-billion-dollar level.

As of July this year, Anthropic's ARR (annual recurring revenue) was only $65 billion, a gap of an order of magnitude. Anthropic is essentially giving the tech giants the money for the next few years.

This is a very good IPO window for Anthropic. There are mainly three aspects.

First, Anthropic is in a phase of rapid expansion, and its current growth rate is what can most impress investors.

According to the prospectus, from 2023 to 2025, Anthropic's revenue grew from $41 million to $4.585 billion. In the first half of the year, Anthropic's revenue was $16.286 billion, a 13-fold year-on-year increase. It seems to have already grown rapidly, but the third quarter was still explosive; based on information mentioned in the prospectus, third-quarter revenue is estimated at about $16.5 billion, already surpassing first-half revenue, still at a 10-fold year-on-year growth rate.

The details shown by ARR also cross-confirm this conclusion. At the beginning of 2025, Anthropic's ARR was only $1 billion; by April this year, it had exceeded $30 billion. According to media reports, by the end of July it had reached $65 billion. This kind of growth rate may be rare even in human history.

Second, Anthropic remains the most user-recognized company in the AI world. This can be seen from user data. Anthropic counts customers using the TTM (trailing twelve months revenue) metric, dividing customers into those under $100,000, above $100,000, above $1 million, and above $10 million.

As of September 30, customers above $100,000 reached 11,900, an increase of 10,400 over three quarters. Those contributing more than $10 million had reached 250, while those below $100,000 reached as many as 40 million.

How imperious is Anthropic toward its customers? The prospectus mentions that part of its revenue comes from "customers who violated usage policies or commercial terms." That is, customers whose accounts were banned; even if these customers have topped up money, they may not get refunds. Many mainland users may already have some sense of this, and may even be full of complaints. Even so, many customers still cannot do without Anthropic.

The core reason is that Anthropic's technical capabilities remain leading. This is also an important "selling point" for Anthropic's current IPO.

Finally, Anthropic at this stage proves that technological leadership can tell a coherent business story. In the first half of the year, Anthropic's net loss was $80.748 billion, but this was mainly determined by financing; losses from convertible bonds, derivative liabilities, and changes in fair value accounted for $72.388 billion, while the actual operating loss was only $693 million.

If measured by operating profit, Anthropic's second-quarter figure was $974 million, achieving positive operating profit for a single quarter for the first time. In the first half of the year, net cash flow from operating activities was $3.929 billion, achieving positive cash flow, meaning the large-model model has strong profitability.

Going public at this moment, Anthropic can obtain a good valuation. Users recognize it and have a strong willingness to pay, and its market bargaining power is strong. It is in a phase of rapid sprinting, and its high growth rate is very eye-catching. At the same time, it has also shown the capital market the sustainability of its business model—it is only temporarily in an investment period, and the business model holds.

02

If it could catch the window when SpaceX went public, it might be even better. The latter, during its IPO in June this year, with the pie in the sky drawn by AI, saw its valuation once surge to $1.77 trillion.

Now, according to Reuters, some investors who attended Anthropic's investor day have lowered their expectations for the IPO valuation, from the previous $2 trillion to around $1.5 trillion. The core reason is that the company's quarter-on-quarter revenue growth has slowed. According to previous estimates, Anthropic's quarter-on-quarter growth rate in the third quarter has dropped to about 43%.

Now may already be the best time; otherwise, it will have to wait longer, with more uncertainty, and possibly even worse.

The AI world changes very rapidly. Before Anthropic, OpenAI was the leader in this market. The latter created the ChatGPT moment and maintained leading model capabilities for a long time. In 2021, seven former OpenAI members left to start businesses and founded Anthropic. In just five years, it achieved a comeback against OpenAI.

It even overtook it across the board: in May, Anthropic's valuation reached $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI. In July, its ARR surpassed OpenAI's.

But Anthropic's lead is also narrowing. October data shows that the performance gap between the top AI models of China and the United States has narrowed to about 3%, a new low. China's large models are continuing to catch up.

On the AI model evaluation platform LiveBench, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash ranks sixth in the world. Its overall performance can already be compared with the top models of Anthropic and OpenAI. Kimi K3.1 Pro, launched by Moonshot AI. Its performance is already close to Opus 5.5.

Chinese models cost less and offer better value for money, and on both the technical capability and commercialization tracks, they may deal a blow to Anthropic. More critically, Chinese models are more open and will not be subject to global export controls like Fable 5.

Perhaps at some point in the future, Anthropic will no longer lead, and commercial monetization will also face a huge impact. In addition, under rapid growth, the base will become larger and larger, and a slowdown in growth itself is inevitable; the later the valuation, the more likely it will be inferior to the present.

To avoid this situation as much as possible, Anthropic has responded.

Anthropic has cut prices to a certain extent, especially for small models. In October, it released Claude Haiku 5.5, its smallest and most affordable model, with input and output unit prices significantly lowered compared with the previous generation: the standard input price fell to $0.10 per million tokens and the output price to $0.50 per million tokens, a unit price reduction of about 90%.

Flagship models have also seen price cuts, but only slightly. For example, in September, Anthropic released Fable 5.1, priced at $10/$50/$0.25 (input/output/cache read, per million tokens, the same below). It is the same as Fable 5 in June, but Fable 5.1 reduces the cost of typical workloads by about 25% compared with Fable 5, with savings of up to 45% on complex coding and high-intensity agentic tasks, which also counts as lowering the cost of using the model.

Before submitting its prospectus, Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5, priced at $4/$20/$0.20; after combining model efficiency improvements, the cost per task is about 40% lower than Opus 5.

But such prices are vastly different from those of domestic Chinese large models. For example, the newly released DeepSeek Flash V4.1 1017 costs $0.15 per million tokens for input, $0.60 for output, and $0.003 for cache read. Compared with Anthropic, it is almost dirt cheap. Kimi K3.1 Pro costs $2 for input, $10 for output, and $0.20 for cache read, with input and output prices only half those of Opus 5.5.

Anthropic's price cuts are only half-hidden, and its prices are still too high compared with Chinese large models. This is determined by cost and business logic. Even in Anthropic's codebase, in September alone, more than 90% of new contributions to Anthropic's codebase were written by Claude. Costs can be pushed down, but its prices most likely cannot reach the extreme levels of Chinese models.

Therefore, for a long time, Anthropic has had no price advantage.

So, if it wants to maintain a global leading advantage, there is only one path—technological leadership.

03

Dazzling capital maneuvers

The prerequisite for technological leadership is computing power security. Anthropic has become a major backer of giants such as Broadcom, SpaceX, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.

SpaceX's third-quarter report shows that its AI business revenue reached 7.56 billion yuan, up 830% year on year, surpassing launch and communications to become its largest business. SpaceX did not mention too many customers; Anthropic is the only one mentioned and also the largest external customer.

In the prospectus, Anthropic mainly mentioned 7 companies. Among them, Broadcom is the largest source of procurement, and the two sides signed a five-year master equipment finance lease, with rent of about 161.2 billion, paid quarterly.

SpaceX's total procurement amount is at most 120.5 billion, with cooperation through 2029, and orders before 2027 are irrevocable. After the deadline, either party may cancel with 90 days' notice. This can be regarded as the cooperation with the most flexible exit.

Google's computing power services amount to as much as 114.5 billion, a typical case of not asking about usage and making up any shortfall, irrevocable except for a major breach by Google. Not only that, Anthropic also committed to additional TPU purchases of 125-150 billion in 2028–2031.

Amazon's computing power services are 110 billion, and like Google's, they do not ask about usage, make up any shortfall, and are irrevocable except for major breach. Microsoft's is 44.9 billion, does not ask about usage, and is partially revocable.

With just these giants, Anthropic has committed to procurement of more than 500 billion at most. Even at an ARR of 100 billion, Anthropic has basically handed over its revenue for the next five years to the giants, which can basically be described as working for the giants.

However, Anthropic does not have enough funds. As of the end of the first half of the year, Anthropic had 112.4 billion in cash and equivalents and 19.3 billion in short-term investments, far from enough to cover the huge procurement orders.

Therefore, Anthropic can only solve this problem through financing.

The most typical is the NPA (note purchase agreement), which, briefly put, means drawing down relevant funds conditionally through financing. For example, the NPA with Google stipulates TTM revenue targets. The cooperation with Broadcom sets requirements for revenue growth. Amazon's 15 billion NPA is unlocked based on delivered computing power: how much computing power Amazon AWS delivers determines how much Anthropic can draw down.

Second is convertible bonds, mainly 6.2 billion associated with Amazon, with the conversion price set at "the lower of the fixed price and the IPO price."

To prevent control from being carved up by the giants as well, Anthropic adopted five equity models. What is publicly offered is Class A, with economic rights. The founder team holds Class F, with no economic rights but 50.1% voting power on ordinary voting matters. The conversion channel is Class N, employee incentives are Class E, and Class T holds the right to elect and remove the board of directors.

It can be seen that the company's decision-making power rests with the seven founders, while external tech giants have not been listed as shareholders and will all have shareholding caps in the future.

Through such methods as financing, conditional unlocking, and dual-class shares, Anthropic maintains its computing power supply as much as possible, which in fact also keeps the entire AI industry mired in doubts of "self-entertainment."

Parting these clouds at the capital level, Anthropic's real value still lies in customer numbers and ARR indicators.

Looking only at these indicators, Anthropic is a phenomenal company in a stage of rapid expansion. What is special is that it is in the AI industry, an industry that may determine the course of humanity, and Anthropic is the king of this industry. But this king's leading advantage is not eternal. At this stage, it may instead be the best time to go public.