Business 4 min read By Alice Ashford
Anthropic revenue reached $17 billion in third quarter as AI spending commitments neared $900 billion
The AI company's amended IPO filing shows revenue still growing rapidly but slowing, while operating costs jumped and the company committed about $895 billion to future compute and infrastructure.
Anthropic generated $17 billion in revenue in the third quarter of 2026, according to an amended initial public offering filing published on the US Securities and Exchange Commission website on Monday. The figure was left out of the company's original IPO prospectus, which was filed last week, and the updated document now includes the latest quarterly results. The numbers show that the artificial intelligence company's sales are still climbing sharply, even as growth slows and costs rise.
Revenue for the three months ended September 30 was up from $11.6 billion in the second quarter and $1.4 billion a year earlier. Sales have increased by more than 1,000 per cent year on year, but the pace has eased. Revenue grew about 47 per cent in the third quarter, down from roughly 144 per cent growth in the previous three months.
The slowdown in growth came alongside a sharp increase in costs. Total operating expenses rose to $17.5 billion from $10.6 billion in the second quarter. As a result, Anthropic reported an operating loss of $567 million, after posting an operating profit of $974 million in the quarter before. The company attributes the loss mainly to computing capacity bought under short-term commitments, which the filing says currently costs significantly more than compute secured under its multi-year agreements.
Anthropic also cites $2 billion in non-cash charges linked to an employee donation matching programme. Excluding stock-based pay and those charitable charges, the business remains profitable on an adjusted basis, and the dollar value of that profit edged up slightly from the second quarter. However, the adjusted operating margin fell to 15 per cent in the third quarter from 19 per cent in the second, largely because of the more expensive short-term compute.
The costs help explain why the company is seeking to lock in long-term data centre capacity on a very large scale. The filing discloses commitments of about $895.4 billion in spending, most of it directed at compute and infrastructure. A large part of that relates to Anthropic Direct, the company's own dedicated infrastructure, which Anthropic says will allow it to replace short-term compute with cheaper long-term capacity as it comes online.
The filing also points to pricing pressure in the sector. Anthropic says that revenue growth from higher usage was partly offset by a decrease of approximately $600 million from price reductions introduced with new model versions and contractual discounts between the second and third quarters. Rivals have been cutting the price of AI models in an effort to win customers, and Anthropic's filing suggests those moves are having a measurable effect on its income.
On the balance sheet, Anthropic had $146.6 billion in liquidity as of September 30, including cash, short-term investments and an available credit line. The company's net loss for the quarter was $23.3 billion, but most of that stemmed from an accounting charge tied to the rising value of its convertible notes rather than from operations.
The amended filing comes as Anthropic moves towards a public listing. Separate filing details reported by financial news outlets indicate the company plans to sell $3.5 billion of shares to investors in Japan as part of the offering. The combination of rapid revenue growth, widening operating costs and very large long-term spending commitments will be closely watched by investors weighing the company's valuation ahead of its market debut.
Source: forbes.com
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