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Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows AI vision, surging costs

143 points · 150 comments · 6thbit

simonw · 1790642845 · focus · HN ↗
I'm confused.
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?
1. TheqO · 1790666111 · focus · HN ↗
  >It's been well documented that Anthropic's revenue growth in 2026 has been enormous.
  Has it? Don't they just self-leak/press release 'ARR' revenue claims? Has there been any audited and formal filings? Including all the off-balance sheet and other creative stuff
  1. simonw · 1790687879 · focus · HN ↗
    We've also heard plenty of stories from companies like Uber about a need to set a limit on their token spending because they were spending so much on Anthropic. That's a solid sign that the revenue numbers are real.
    TheqO · 1790690228 · focus · HN ↗
    It's a solid sign the numbers are not real...
    What Uber and other companies said is that the money they spent didn't generate the expected value they were promised. If it had generated $2 for every $1 spent, then Uber would be spending with no limits.
    The lack of demonstrable return on investment means there is a ceiling to the market size, and profit is capped as cheaper models and self hosted open source models limit the amount flagship models can charge.
    Long way to go till market saturation though so they will grow for foreseeable, but its a quandary of how much they spend on R&D vs giving future shareholders dividends.
    simonw · 1790690877 · focus · HN ↗
    If Uber think there's no ROI, why do they allow each of their employees to spend $1,500 per month per tool?
    Shouldn't they have set that per-employee budget to zero instead?
    (I dug up the original source for that Uber doubts the ROI story a few months ago, it's a lot weaker than the headlines about it suggested: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/27/product-market-fit/#the-ai-failure-stories-around-this-are-pretty-thin" rel="nofollow">https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/27/product-market-fit/#th...)
    TheqO · 1790691920 · focus · HN ↗
    I didn't mean 'no ROI', clearly AI is a productivity boost.
    For the AI companies to IPO at the money they want, they have to promise that they are going to be worth many multiples more of that value.
    But currently they are spending hundreds of billions and despite this their models are not light years ahead of each other, or of the companies with much lower budgets and compute power.
    What they claim they can offer in future profits is subject to considerable debate.
    It's in the interests of VC's and their underlying rich investors to hype it ip, IPO and bank the cold hard cash.
    simonw · 1790693798 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, I agree with all of that.
    maxglute · 1790709665 · focus · HN ↗
    If Uber caps employee AI spend at $1500, then they've just admitted per employee AI spend on par with premium health care or commercial rent both in the 1000-1500 range, and this limited to just technical employees, i.e. subsect so presumably AI as % of business cost even lower. Health insurance 1T industry... commercial RE like 100 billion...
    Anthropic thinks it's worth more than insuring all US workers AND putting roof over their heads. AI sector thinks its worth magnitude more in aggregate. If they fully displace people, i.e. untied to headcount eventually then sure, but if not, based on what Uber pays, AI is basically worth as much as insurance.

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