Anthropic’s first quarter in the black hasn’t lasted long.
The Claude maker filed an amended S-1 registration statement with the SEC on Monday, adding audited third-quarter results to the IPO prospectus it first made public on October 26. The update shows the company swinging from a $974 million operating profit in the second quarter to a $567 million operating loss in the third, even as revenue climbed to roughly $17 billion for the quarter. It’s the clearest sign yet that Anthropic’s brief run of profitability was powered by temporary conditions rather than a durable shift in its cost structure.
The filing also puts, for the first time, a number on the company’s total compute and infrastructure obligations: approximately $895.4 billion, a figure that was left blank in the original S-1 filed just a week earlier.
Why Anthropic Fell Back Into The Red
Anthropic’s operating expenses rose to $17.5 billion in the third quarter, up from $10.6 billion in the second, outpacing revenue growth and erasing the operating profit the company had posted just one quarter earlier. The company attributed the swing primarily to compute bought under short-term commitments, which it says “currently costs significantly more” than capacity secured under its multi-year deals with cloud and chip partners.
The filing discloses that $5.0 billion of the quarter’s compute spend came from these pricier short-term arrangements, pushing compute and infrastructure costs up to roughly 58% of revenue for the period. A separate $2 billion non-cash charge tied to Anthropic’s employee donation-matching program, in which the company matches staff charitable contributions with equity, added further weight to the loss. Together, the two items account for most of the gap between Q2’s profit and Q3’s loss.
On the adjusted basis Anthropic uses internally, which strips out stock-based compensation, the non-cash charitable charge and a prior legal settlement, the picture is less dramatic but still shows the same direction: Adjusted Operating Income rose modestly to about $2.5 billion from $2.2 billion the prior quarter, but Adjusted Operating Margin fell to roughly 15% from 19%, since expenses grew faster than the adjusted profit did. Anthropic has signaled that it expects to keep relying on more expensive short-term compute in the near term, which would squeeze margins further before cheaper long-term capacity comes fully online.
The company’s net loss for the quarter came in far higher, at $23.3 billion, but that figure is driven almost entirely by a non-cash accounting charge tied to the rising fair value of its convertible notes as Anthropic’s valuation has climbed — a dynamic that Anthropic had already flagged to prospective investors ahead of the formal filing. On a cash basis, the underlying business looked considerably healthier: operating cash flow was positive at roughly $7 billion for the first nine months of 2026.
The $895 Billion Question
The number that’s likely to dominate conversation around Anthropic’s IPO is its total compute and infrastructure commitment, which the amended filing puts at approximately $895.4 billion as of and after September 30. That’s nearly double the roughly $518 billion figure that had circulated from an earlier leaked draft of the prospectus, and it underscores just how aggressively Anthropic is locking in capacity to keep Claude at the frontier.
Of that total, about $447 billion is expected to come due before the end of 2030, while a more immediate $70 billion is due within the next 12 months. A further $214 billion of the commitments carry termination rights or other contingent conditions, meaning Anthropic has some ability to walk away from or renegotiate a meaningful chunk of the total if its growth trajectory changes.
Leases that have been signed but have not yet commenced make up the largest single piece of the obligation, at roughly $451 billion of the $895 billion total — reflecting how much of Anthropic’s future data center capacity is still under construction or awaiting activation. About $100 billion of the total was signed after September 30, after the period covered by the filing’s core financials, showing the pace of dealmaking hasn’t slowed even as the company prepares to go public. On top of all that, another $150 billion to $175 billion in additional compute agreements, including further TPU purchases from Google and a planned deal with AMD, sit outside the $895 billion figure entirely because they don’t yet carry fixed dollar commitments.
Much of this infrastructure buildout is tied to Anthropic Direct, the company’s own dedicated infrastructure program, which it says should eventually let it replace expensive short-term compute with cheaper long-term capacity as new data centers come online.
Google’s Commitment Keeps Growing
Among Anthropic’s named infrastructure partners, Google’s minimum commitment has grown again. The amended filing shows Google’s minimum spend commitment rising to about $121 billion through July 2033, up from roughly $115 billion disclosed in the October 26 filing, following amendments the two companies signed through October. Broadcom, SpaceX’s AI unit, and Amazon round out the next-largest disclosed commitments, each in the $110 billion-to-$161 billion range, cementing Anthropic’s position as one of the largest customers — and increasingly a competitor — to the hyperscalers it depends on for compute.
Liquidity Still Looks Comfortable, For Now
Despite the swing to a loss, Anthropic’s balance sheet remains well capitalized heading into its roadshow. The filing shows total liquidity of $147 billion as of September 30, made up of $96 billion in cash, $36 billion in short-term investments, and $15 billion of available credit. That gives the company a substantial cushion relative to its near-term obligations, even if it’s a fraction of the total compute bill stretching out through 2030 and beyond.
With formal IPO marketing expected to begin in the coming days, the amended filing gives prospective investors their first real look at how Anthropic’s economics behave once short-term, premium-priced compute enters the picture — and it sets up a central question for the roadshow: whether the company’s long-term infrastructure bets pay off quickly enough to keep margins moving in the right direction once Anthropic lists.