Anthropic IPO: The Big Questions Its S-1 Leaves Unanswered

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Anthropic’s 300-plus page S-1 filing earlier this week contained a lot information. This is the most comprehensive public statement yet on how an AI lab purely makes money.

After the prospectus went live on Monday, my U.S.-based colleagues and I examined it with a fine-tooth comb, detailing everything from revenue and risks to competitors and IT costs.

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

But despite all these nuggets, some big questions remain.

Anthropic reported a cost price of $2.38 billion in the first half of 2026, representing revenue of $16.29 billion in the same period and implying a gross margin of 85%.

Violeta Todorova, senior research analyst at Leverage Shares, told CNBC that first-half revenue compared to just $1.16 billion in the first half of 2025, and questioned whether it could grow to “keep pace with expectations.”

“It’s not clear how much it costs to generate each additional dollar of revenue as computing demand increases,” she said.

But Anthropic’s breakneck revenue growth slowed in the third quarter. It increased by approximately 144% in the second quarter compared to the first quarter, followed by approximately 47% in the third quarter.

“What the prospectus doesn’t tell us is management’s expectations for the growth rate to slow sequentially,” said Michael Field, chief equity strategist at Morningstar.

“Nearly all of the cost of revenue” is associated with compute and infrastructure costs, the filing says. It also states that operating margin and adjusted operating margin are expected to “fluctuate over time, particularly in periods where substantial additional calculations are provided to us and we incur associated expenses.”

“Investors may see the share of compute in revenue declining, but not the share of future engagement devoted to training the next generation of models rather than serving customers,” Nick Patience, head of AI at Futurum Group, told CNBC. “This distribution dictates future margins.”

Questions also remain about whether compute costs can continue to fall faster as commitments increase and whether Anthropic can guarantee enough capacity to serve its customers, he added.

Regarding demand in the AI ​​and hyperscaler sector outstripping supply, the prospectus said it had previously sought “amounts of compute from (cloud service providers) in excess of what these partners were willing to provide.”

Further, it states: “Historically, we have operated in a constrained compute environment, where the demand for compute has exceeded the supply available to us. »

Anthropic’s structure as a public benefit corporation also raises questions. Seven co-founders, including CEO Dario Amodei, have special voting rights through a single Class F share equal to 50.1% of the total voting rights on matters submitted to shareholders for a vote.

Anthropic describes its capital and corporate governance structure as having “no direct public company precedent” on file.

“We also know now that management is planning a series of equity offerings of different classes,” Morningstar’s Field said. “But what we don’t know is whether investors will accept the lack of control involved or whether it will impact the stock price. We won’t know until the shares start trading.”

And finally the trillion-dollar question: the valuation of Anthropic’s targeted IPO. The AI ​​laboratory is not talking about it at the moment. It simply says that this will be “determined by negotiations between us, the selling shareholders and the representatives”.

Given that analyst estimates are between $1 trillion and $2 trillion, this will be a huge market event. If it’s at the high end of the range, it could bring back some of the boldness that the AI ​​sector has lost in recent weeks. If one is on the lower end of the scale, things could get ugly.

Anthropic’s S-1 was a wealth of information about the company, but one number really caught my attention. The AI ​​lab has more cash on hand than almost any company in the United States. And, as my colleague Leslie Picker writes, never before has a company gone public with so much money.