Anthropic has finally filed to go public, and the numbers are extraordinary. Second-quarter revenue rose 1,368% year over year. The first half of 2026 revenue was approximately $16.3 billion. What was just a few years ago something that most people outside of technology hardly heard of is now a significant enterprise product being used by some of the largest companies in the world. Wow, Claude has come a long way. Anthropic is planning to go public on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, and with the amount of money already flowing into artificial intelligence, I’d wager there will be plenty of investors wanting a piece of it. I am interested too. I am just not ready to buy it.
That may sound odd when a company is growing this fast, but growth is simply one piece of an investment. The other aspect is you are being asked to pay for it. Anthropic has not specified how many shares it plans to sell or the price range for its IPO. Until we get those figures, investors know a lot more about the firm than they do about the stock.
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I have seen this error made way too many times in markets over the last 35+ years. Investors find a great business, get excited because the prospect is huge, and then avoid the last question since it seems almost rude to ask it. What is included in the price?
Anthropic Is Growing Fast. It Is Also Spending Fast
There will be plenty written about Anthropic's $80.7 billion net loss for the first six months of the year. I would not spend too much time staring at that number because most of it came from a non-cash accounting charge tied to the rising value of convertible securities. The underlying business still consumes an enormous amount of capital, but the headline loss makes the economics look stranger than they really are. The number I care about more is what Anthropic must spend to keep competing.
The company spent almost $9 billion on computing capacity and infrastructure during the first half of 2026, up sharply from a year earlier, and Reuters reports that Anthropic has entered long-term commitments of at least $518 billion covering cloud services, computing, and infrastructure over the coming decade. Anthropic itself has announced major capacity agreements with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and SpaceX as it races to secure the computing power required to train and run increasingly capable models.
None of that means the company is doing anything wrong. If demand is growing as quickly as Anthropic says it is, management would be foolish not to secure capacity. The issue for an investor is slightly different. Huge revenue growth looks wonderful on the chart. Huge revenue growth accompanied by enormous future capital commitments requires a little more work.
I want to know what happens to margins once the business settles down, how much additional capital must go into keeping Claude at the frontier, and whether customers eventually become more or less expensive to serve. We are still early enough in AI that nobody should pretend those answers are obvious.
A company can grow very quickly and still produce mediocre returns for shareholders if too much money must be reinvested to sustain that growth. Telecom investors learned that lesson during the internet buildout. The internet changed the world exactly as predicted. That did not mean everybody who financed the infrastructure made money.
Amazon and Google Are Already Getting Paid
There is another part of the Anthropic filing that I find particularly revealing. Amazon and Google are major investors in the company, but they are also important suppliers and distribution partners. Anthropic generated 47% of its 2025 revenue through Amazon and Google's cloud marketplaces. At the same time, those companies provide much of the infrastructure Anthropic needs to operate.
I always pay attention when the same companies appear on several sides of the economics.
Amazon can benefit from Anthropic becoming more valuable through its investment. AWS can benefit when Anthropic buys computing capacity. Amazon can also collect economics, as Claude is distributed through its cloud platform. Google has a similar relationship, but it is also competing aggressively in AI itself. That does not make Anthropic unattractive. It does make me want to understand how much of the value created by Claude ultimately stays with Anthropic shareholders.
This nuance is something investors sometimes miss when a new technology takes off. They focus on the company at the center of the excitement and forget who gets paid around it. Semiconductor suppliers get paid. Cloud companies get paid. Data-center owners get paid. Power companies get paid. The AI model company has to generate enough value after all of that to justify what investors paid for the equity. At the right valuation, that may be an excellent trade.
The IPO Price Changes Everything
Anthropic was valued at $965 billion in its May private financing. More recently, some investors have discussed an IPO valuation around $1.5 trillion, although the company has not announced an official price range. That gap matters. At one valuation I may be interested. At another, I may decide the next several years of outstanding execution are already sitting in the stock before the first public shareholder buys a share. This is where I think individual investors need to slow down.
There will be enormous attention around this IPO. Claude is a real product. Anthropic is growing at a rate almost no public company can match. AI is probably going to change huge parts of the economy. None of those statements answers the question of whether ANT will be a good stock from the price at which it begins trading.
I would wait for the price range and then work backwards. What revenue multiple am I paying? What level of future margins does the valuation require? How much capital still has to be committed before the business reaches maturity? What happens if revenue growth slows down from extraordinary to merely excellent? And how much of the eventual economics will be captured by Anthropic rather than by the infrastructure companies surrounding it? Those are not reasons to avoid the IPO. They are reasons not to fall in love with it before we know what it costs.
There is another temptation with highly anticipated IPOs. Investors worry that if they do not buy immediately, they will miss it. I have never worried much about that. If Anthropic becomes one of the great businesses of the next decade, there will be plenty of time to own it. I would rather pay a little more after seeing the economics develop than pay almost any price because I am frightened of missing the first move.
The prospectus has already answered one question. Anthropic is growing extraordinarily fast. It has not answered the question that matters most to me as an investor. What am I being asked to pay for that growth? Until we know that, I am watching ANT rather than buying it.
On the date of publication, Jim Osman did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. For more information please view the Barchart Disclosure Policy here.
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