Anthropic has now shown investors what its third quarter looked like, and the picture is more complicated than the headline. In an amended IPO filing lodged with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday 2 November, the company behind Claude reported revenue of about $17 billion for the three months to 30 September, roughly twelve times the same period last year. It also reported a swing back to an operating loss, a sharp slowdown in growth, and spending commitments of $895.4 billion.
The first version of the prospectus, published a week earlier, only covered the first half of the year. We looked at that draft in our report on Anthropic's IPO filing and its compute bill. This update fills the gap, and it matters because Anthropic is expected to price its Nasdaq listing, under the ticker ANT, later this month.
The headline numbers
Third-quarter revenue was $16.96 billion, according to the filing as reported by Reuters and Fortune. That compares with $11.6 billion in the second quarter and $1.4 billion a year earlier, a rise of about 1,127% year on year. For the first nine months of 2026, revenue was $33.24 billion, up roughly 1,200%, according to CNBC.
The net loss looks startling: $23.29 billion for the quarter and about $104 billion for the nine months. But most of that is an accounting charge tied to the changing fair value of convertible notes and derivatives, not cash leaving the business. As Anthropic's valuation rises, the instruments that can convert into shares become more valuable, and accounting rules record that as a loss. The more useful measure is operating income.
Why growth slowed and profit vanished
Revenue still rose about 47% from the second quarter, but that is well below the 144% quarter-on-quarter growth reported for the second quarter and 132% for the first, as CNBC notes. Slower percentage growth is partly arithmetic: it is much harder to double a $11.6 billion quarter than a $4 billion one. Even so, it is the number analysts will watch most closely before the share sale.
Total operating expenses jumped to $17.5 billion from $10.6 billion in the second quarter. That turned a $974 million operating profit into a $567 million operating loss. Anthropic puts the blame mainly on compute it bought under short-term commitments, which the filing says "currently costs significantly more" than capacity secured through multi-year contracts. A further $2 billion came from non-cash charges tied to an employee donation-matching programme, Fortune reports.
On an adjusted basis, which strips out stock-based pay and those charitable charges, the business remained profitable, with the dollar profit edging up from the second quarter. But the adjusted operating margin fell to 15% from 19% in the previous quarter, Fortune reports.
There is also a hint of pricing pressure. The filing says growth from higher usage was partly offset by a decrease of roughly $600 million from price reductions introduced with new model versions, plus contractual discounts. In plain terms, Anthropic is selling more, but each unit of AI is getting cheaper, a pattern that every major lab is facing as rivals compete for business customers.
The $895 billion question
The figure that has drawn the most attention is the commitments line. Anthropic says it has entered into purchase commitments and leases with an aggregate committed spend of about $895.4 billion, "substantially all" of it for compute and infrastructure. Reuters reports that nearly half is expected to fall due before the end of 2030, with about $70 billion due in the twelve months after 30 September.
That is up from the roughly $750 billion total reported from the first draft, and it dwarfs the company's own revenue. Much of the spending relates to what Fortune calls Anthropic Direct, the company's own dedicated infrastructure, which it says will let it swap expensive short-term capacity for cheaper long-term capacity as new data centres come online. The company had $146.6 billion of liquidity at the end of September, including cash, short-term investments and an available credit line.
The risk, which the filing and several outlets stress, is dependence on partners. Anthropic draws much of its capacity from Amazon, Google and SpaceX, and some from specialist "neocloud" providers. CNBC reports that Wall Street has become nervous about rising interest rates making data-centre debt harder to afford, and that recent results from Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon added to concerns that capacity may not arrive quickly enough.
The UK angle
This story is American, but it reaches Britain through the power and data-centre chain. Britain has been trying to attract AI infrastructure, and the strain on that chain has already shown. On 20 October we reported on Microsoft stepping back from Nscale's Loughton site, with grid capacity part of the story. A buyer with nearly $900 billion of obligations can keep that kind of project alive, but only if the financing around it holds. Anthropic's own filing says as much about its suppliers.
For British businesses and public bodies using Claude, the more immediate point is stability. A supplier with huge fixed costs and falling unit prices is likely to keep cutting prices while it grows. The same pressure is why we have seen so many new model versions and cheaper tiers recently. Our comparison of ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude shows how close the rivals now are on price and quality.
What happens next
Anthropic is preparing to start its roadshow, and the filing still leaves the price range and share count blank. The registration statement is not yet effective, so the details can change. Its rival OpenAI confidentially filed in June but is signalling a 2027 debut, according to CNBC.
The test for investors is whether the long-term compute deals turn today's costly short-term spending into a lasting margin advantage, and whether usage keeps growing fast enough to justify a bill of this size. We will report when the pricing is set.