Anthropic’s financials are surprisingly strong

Back in June, Anthropic filed a confidential draft of its S-1 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission — a crucial step toward offering stock to the general public. On Monday, Anthropic announced that it had filed a public version of the same document. I read it cover to cover, and I learned a lot about the company’s finances — at least through June 30 of this year.

Overall, the company’s financial position is surprisingly good. Revenue soared between 2025 and early 2026, allowing the company to report its first-ever operating profit in the second quarter. At the end of June, Anthropic had more cash reserves than all but two non-bank companies: Google and Berkshire Hathaway.

However, the next couple of years could be challenging for the AI giant. Anticipating continued growth, Anthropic has committed to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on compute from Amazon, Google, SpaceXAI, Broadcom, and other companies. To recoup that spending, Anthropic needs its annual revenue to grow to hundreds of billions of dollars as well.

Anthropic hasn’t officially reported its third quarter revenue, but media reports suggest a modest slowdown in revenue growth. Revenue surged from $4.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026 to $11.6 billion in the second quarter. Third quarter revenue was $16.8 billion. That’s still incredible growth by normal corporate standards, but it’s a slower pace of growth than in the previous quarter.

So the biggest open question about Anthropic’s finances is why revenue didn’t grow faster in the third quarter — and what that says about the future. Maybe Anthropic’s revenue will continue growing exponentially over the coming year. In that case, the company will easily be able to pay for its compute commitments.

But it’s also possible that demand for Claude Code and Anthropic’s other products is nearing saturation. In that case, revenue might grow even more slowly in the fourth quarter and beyond. Then the company could struggle to make good on the hundreds of billions of dollars in spending commitments it has already made.

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