The big questions its S-1 leaves unanswered

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Anthropic’s over 300 page S-1 filing earlier this week contained a lot of information. It was the most comprehensive public statement to date about how a pure-play AI lab makes its money.

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

The filing also revealed that CEO Dario Amodei and his six co-founders each own over 200 million shares, which could be worth billions if Anthropic hits the over $1 trillion valuation it’s expected to.

But despite all the nuggets, a few big questions remain.

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

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

“It is unclear how much it costs to generate each additional dollar of revenue as computing demand increases,” she said.

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

“What the prospectus didn’t tell us is management’s expectations around the sequential slowdown in the growth rate,” said Michael Field, chief equity strategist at Morningstar.

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

“Investors can see compute falling as a share of revenue, but not how much of the forward commitment is earmarked for training the next generation of models versus serving customers,” Nick Patience, AI lead at the Futurum Group, told CNBC. “That split dictates future margins.”

Questions also remain around whether compute costs can keep falling faster than commitments grow and if Anthropic can secure enough capacity to serve customers, he added.

Regarding demand across the AI and hyperscaler sector outstripping supply, the prospectus says that it had previously sought “quantities of compute from [cloud service providers] in excess of what those partners were willing to provide.”

Later it says: “We have historically operated in a compute-constrained environment in which demand for compute has exceeded the supply available to us.”

Anthropic’s structure as a public benefit corporation raises questions, too. Seven co-founders, including CEO Dario Amodei, have special voting power through a single Class F share equal to 50.1% of total voting power over matters brought to a shareholder vote.

Anthropic describes its capital and corporate governance structure as having “no direct public company precedent,” in the filing.

“We also know now that management plans a series of different class share issues,” said Morningstar’s Field. “But what we don’t know is whether investors will be fine with the lack of control implied, or will this impact the share price. Something we won’t know until the shares start trading.”

And finally the trillion-dollar question: the IPO valuation that Anthropic targets. The AI lab is keeping schtum about that, for now. It says simply it will be “determined by negotiations among us, the selling stockholders, and the representatives.”

Given analyst estimates range between $1 trillion and $2 trillion, it will be a huge market event. If it’s at the higher end of the range, it could bring back some of the swagger the AI sector has lost in recent weeks. If on the lower end, things could get ugly. 

Anthropic’s S-1 was a trove of company intel, but one figure really caught my eye. The AI lab has more cash than almost every company in the U.S. And, as my colleague Leslie Picker writes, never before has a company gone public with anywhere near that much.