Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows AI vision, surging costs
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Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows AI vision, surging costs
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
simonw · · focus · HN ↗
The numbers that Reuters describe in this article were entirely for 2025.
It's been well documented that Anthropic's revenue growth in 2026 has been enormous. This was the year of coding agents, and tokenmaxxing, and companies blowing enormous amounts of money on AI thanks to coding agent users spending hundreds (or thousands) of dollars a day.
Given that, I don't understand why the article and the headline are based exclusively on those 2025 numbers, with not so much as a hint to the reader that there are figures from the past 9 months that aren't covered by the documents Reuters saw.
Losing $8bn in 2025 isn't particularly notable if you've made ~10x that amount of revenue in 2026.
(How much did they lose in 2026? Wouldn't we love to know that!)
Is this just a thing with leaked IPO prospectuses and coverage of them?
sensanaty · · focus · HN ↗
By whom, exactly?
singularity2001 · · focus · HN ↗
benterix · · focus · HN ↗
besterman23 · · focus · HN ↗
josefresco · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/anthropic-revenue-run-rate-tops-65-billion-source-says-2026-08-17/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/technology/anthropic-revenue-run-rat...
sensanaty · · focus · HN ↗
This isn't a standardized metric like GAAP revenue, and the company chooses how to compute it. Nothing stops them from taking a strong month (or week, or day, or hell even a second of revenue) and multiplying it out. It's also a different thing from booked revenue: the prospectus shows about $4.6B recognized in 2025, versus a ~$9B run rate at year-end.
Even taken at face value, it tells us nothing about costs. In 2025 they lost about $8B operating on $4.6B revenue, with compute alone at $7.3B. The $42B net loss is inflated by a ~$34B non-cash charge, so I'm ignoring that. The company says it hit positive adjusted operating income in Q2, but that's their own number, "adjusted" excludes whatever they choose such as training costs or the cost of staff, and we won't know the real picture until the full S-1 is public. Meanwhile they've disclosed $518B in future compute and infrastructure commitments against ~$20B in cash.
If they had a trillion dollars worth of revenue, it wouldn't mean jack shit if they had a trillion + 1 in losses.
simonw · · focus · HN ↗
I don't understand that argument.
If a company has a trillion dollars in revenue, even if they are losing money hand-over-fist, that still means they have convinced other companies to cough up a trillion dollars for what they are selling. That's a big deal!
The only case that isn't impressive is if they are literally selling dollar bills for 90 cents.
You can argue that Anthropic are subsidizing their tokens all you want, but since as a customer you can't just turn around and sell a token yourself for more than you paid for it that's still not a good argument for dismissing the amount people are willing to spend.
unlogic · · focus · HN ↗
> but since as a customer you can't just turn around and sell a token yourself for more than you paid
You can't purchase a dollar for 90 cents and sell it for 95 if the original seller keeps selling for 90.
simonw · · focus · HN ↗
If you make a trillion dollars by allowing other people to make a profit through arbitrage, that trillion dollars is meaningless.
If you subsidize a product such that you spend more money producing it than your customers pay you, but that product is NOT something they can sell on directly and pocket the difference, then selling a trillion dollars of it is still impressive because it demonstrates that you have a product people assign a trillion dollars of value to.