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Follow the Money Both Ways - Four Predictions for Anthropic's S-1

Lida Liberopoulou ·23 October 2026 · CC BY-SA 4.0
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Independent research on AI economics and infrastructure · Commissioned research

This piece asks whether Anthropic's S-1 will let a reader follow the money between Anthropic, the companies that fund it and the companies it pays, or whether, like the filings around it so far, it will show each piece but not the whole. Four predictions, each with a pass and a fail, filed before the S-1 was public. I will score them in public, including the ones I get wrong.

Anthropic is expected to make its stock market prospectus (S-1) public within days, possibly today. Most of the big numbers are already known from leaked drafts. Three stand out.

It has fast-growing sales. According to reporting on its leaked draft, Anthropic sold about $16.3 billion of access to its AI models in the first half of 2026, up from $1.1 billion a year earlier. In the third quarter alone it sold $16.8 billion. Few companies of any kind have grown this fast. But the pace is slowing: sales rose 45% from the previous quarter, after more than doubling the quarter before.

It has large losses. The same draft reportedly shows a loss of $80.7 billion in the first half of the year, against $13 billion a year earlier. Most of that, about $72 billion, did not come from running the business. It came from how Anthropic raised money. Some investors lent it money that can later turn into shares. When Anthropic's value rose, those loans became worth more to the investors, and Anthropic had to record that as a cost. So the better Anthropic did, the bigger its loss on paper.

And it has more than half a trillion dollars of computing bills. Anthropic has signed up to pay at least $518 billion for computing and data centres over the coming years. About 80% of it has to be paid whether or not Anthropic uses the capacity. That is nearly eight years of sales at its third-quarter pace. The biggest bills go to Google, Amazon and Microsoft, which are also among its investors, and to chips leased through Broadcom.

At first glance, this is a familiar story. A young company grows very fast, spends heavily to keep growing, and prepares to sell shares to the public to help pay for it. But there is something unusual here. The companies Anthropic owes the most money to are also among the companies that own it. And the figures reported about its biggest deals describe different things, so they cannot simply be added up.

The S-1 will be Anthropic’s first official public account of these deals. Before it is public, I decided to write down four predictions about how much of the whole picture it will let a reader see.

I first posted them on X on 23 October, before the S-1 was public. If you'd rather skip my reasoning, you can go straight to the predictions.

Why does it matter who Anthropic is paying?

Because the companies it pays the most are also among the ones that own it. When your biggest supplier is also your owner, two things get hard to tell apart: how much of these companies’ sales to Anthropic is ordinary business, and how much is their own investment coming back to them.

Anthropic's leaked draft reportedly lists about $111 billion of computing from Google, about $110 billion from Amazon and about $31 billion from Microsoft. All three have also invested in Anthropic, though "invested" can mean three different things: cash actually put in, what the stake is worth now, or money promised for later. Amazon has put in $18 billion in cash over the years, including $10 billion this spring, and its stake is now worth far more on its books. Google agreed to invest up to $40 billion, but only $10 billion straight away, with the rest depending on targets. Microsoft committed up to $5 billion, alongside up to $10 billion from Nvidia, whose chips Anthropic also uses.

Amazon shows how this works. When Anthropic's value rises, Amazon counts the increase as profit, even though no cash changes hands. In the three months to June, that came to $53.4 billion before tax, mainly from Anthropic. Amazon's profit from actually running its business (selling goods, cloud computing and advertising) was $27.5 billion. In the same period, Amazon said Anthropic had agreed to buy more than $100 billion of computing from it over ten years.

Neither number is cash from Anthropic today. The $53.4 billion has already been counted in Amazon’s profit. The $100 billion is business still to be delivered and paid for. Both tie Amazon to Anthropic, in two different ways: through what its stake is worth, and through whether Anthropic can pay what it has promised.

None of this is hidden. Each piece is disclosed somewhere. What is hard to see is the whole, and the whole is what matters if something goes wrong. A problem at Anthropic would not just hit these companies once and go away. It would hit their sales, their profits and the money they have lent or promised, all at the same time.

Why can't the numbers be added up?

The same pattern runs through Anthropic's biggest chip deal. Anthropic leases Google's custom AI chips, which are made in collaboration with Broadcom. Broadcom sells the chips, guarantees part of the leases, and could lend Anthropic up to $42 billion in loans that can later turn into Anthropic shares. It is a seller, guarantor and possible future owner, all in one company.

Five figures have been reported about this deal, and they are easy to read as different estimates of the same thing. They are not.

  • $35 billion: a financing announced in June by Broadcom, Apollo and Blackstone to fund Anthropic's computing at Fluidstack data centres.
  • About $60 billion: a separate financing reported by the Financial Times this month, backed by Anthropic's lease payments on Google's chips. Blackstone was offered $9 billion of its riskiest part, at 10% interest. Another $9 billion is expected to be offered to other investors.
  • $42 billion: the most Anthropic can borrow from Broadcom, in some circumstances, to pay those leases, through loans that can turn into shares. Anthropic had not borrowed any of it as of 2 August.
  • $125.2 billion: the payments due over five years on the main chip lease, reported from the leaked draft.
  • About $161.2 billion: all the Broadcom-related lease payments in the same draft.

Why not just add them up? Because they measure different things. The $35 billion and the $60 billion are financing: money lined up to pay for the chips and data centres. The $125.2 billion and $161.2 billion are payments: what Anthropic is due to pay on its leases over the years, part of which goes to repaying that financing, with interest. The $42 billion is a back-up way to cover those payments, and none of it had been used by August. Adding all five would mix money borrowed with the payments meant to repay it.

Think of a car bought for €30,000 with a €25,000 loan, paid off at €35,000 over five years. Adding those up to €90,000 makes no sense, because the payments already include paying back the loan. The real bill here is the payments, about $161.2 billion. What can't be seen from outside is how that total breaks down: which leases, and which loans sit behind each one.

And the leaked draft reportedly says that if Anthropic misses a payment, a large part of the lease bills can become due at once, and the Broadcom loan can be cut off at the same moment.

The S-1 is where these pieces could be shown together. Whether it does is one of the predictions.

The predictions

The short version, if you skipped ahead: Anthropic owes far more than it sells, mostly to companies that also own part of it. These predictions test whether the S-1 lets a reader follow the money.

1. Will the S-1 connect the money raised to bills already signed?

Every S-1 has a section saying what the money from selling shares will be spent on. Most keep it vague, so the company stays free to use the money however it likes. Anthropic has hundreds of billions in computing bills already signed, and those will have to be paid for somehow. I expect the S-1 not to say the share sale is part of how.

Pass: the section stays vague, such as "general corporate purposes", "investment in equipment" or "expanding our computing capacity".

Fail: it explicitly says the money will go towards computing commitments, leases or agreements Anthropic has already signed.

2. Will Amazon or Alphabet be left out of the section on dealings with big owners?

The S-1 has a section that lists business done with insiders, such as directors, executives and big owners. For owners, it generally only has to include those holding more than 5% of the voting shares. Amazon's own filings say its Anthropic shares carry no vote. So Amazon could be both a major owner and a major supplier and still be left out of that section. Mentions elsewhere in the S-1 don't count for this test.

Pass: neither Amazon nor Alphabet (including AWS or Google Cloud) appears in that section in connection with computing or cloud purchases.

Fail: either does.

3. Can the Broadcom chip bills be pieced together from the S-1 alone?

Five figures have been reported: $35bn, $42bn, ~$60bn, $125.2bn and ~$161.2bn. Two are amounts lenders put up to buy chips, one is a borrowing limit (none of it drawn as of August), and two are total payments owed over the years. They are different kinds of numbers, not five estimates of one deal.

Pass: the S-1 does not give enough detail on the individual Broadcom-related leases to show how they make up the ~$161.2bn total.

Fail: it lists the individual lease bills with enough detail to rebuild that total.

4. Can both sides of each relationship be put in numbers?

For Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft, there are two numbers that matter: how much cash each has actually put into Anthropic (not what its stake is worth now, or what it has promised to invest later), and how much Anthropic has committed to pay each of them.

Pass: the S-1 does not let a reader state both numbers for all three companies.

Fail: it does, wherever in the S-1 they appear.

Claims 1 and 4 are the likelier ones, and I say so in advance. Claims 2 and 3 are closer calls. And if these look like safe bets, that's the point. A company with this much at stake can follow every rule and still not let a reader follow the money.

How this will be scored

Each prediction is scored against the first public version of the S-1. If a later version changes the answer before the shares are sold, I will note it, but the first public version decides. The results will go into the Compute Watch on 2 November, hits and misses alike. If the S-1 isn't public by then, the predictions stay open until it is.

Much of this piece rests on reporting about confidential drafts. The public version may differ, and where it does, the public version is what counts.

In July, I filed six claims like these about what Microsoft, Apple and Amazon's earnings filings would disclose, before they reported. All six held. These are harder, and I expect to miss some.

Sources