Somewhere in the registration statement Anthropic filed with the SEC on Monday is the sentence that ought to decide what the company is worth. It reads: "we have entered into purchase commitments and lease agreements ... with an aggregate committed spend of more than $ " — and then it stops. The table meant to break it down — operating leases, finance leases, purchase commitments, total — is sitting there empty.
The document does carry a pair of numbers pulling in opposite directions: $16.3 billion of revenue in the first half of 2026, and an $80.7 billion net loss. It is worth being precise about which of those is the business and which is the scoreboard.
The loss is a mark, not a bill
Of the $80.7 billion, $72.4 billion is a change in fair value of convertible notes, derivatives and SAFEs — 89.6%, and a line that grows as the private valuation rises. The accumulated deficit is $132.9 billion, $113.2 billion of it that same mark.
Strip it out and the operating business looks different: a $693 million operating loss for the six months, against $2.1 billion a year earlier. In the second quarter alone it posted $974 million of operating income — 8% margin, 19% adjusted — its first positive quarter in the filing. Operating cash flow was plus $3.9 billion, from minus $1.5 billion. Revenue went from $1.16 billion to $16.29 billion, a 14-fold jump.
The bill is real
Compute and infrastructure cost $8.9 billion in six months, more than the $7.3 billion it spent in all of 2025, and 55% of revenue. Four obligations are payable whether or not customers show up:
- Google — at least $114.5 billion between April 2026 and July 2033, with a true-up if spending falls short
- Amazon — at least $110 billion between May 2026 and April 2036, also with a true-up
- Microsoft — at least $44.9 billion between November 2026 and May 2033, "regardless of actual usage"
- Broadcom-built TPU hardware — $161.2 billion of finance-lease rent, non-cancelable short of default
That is $430.6 billion that cannot be walked away from. Count the softer deals — SpaceXAI at up to $120.5 billion (about $3.1 billion a month once capacity lands in December, either side free to leave on 90 days' notice after early 2027), Nscale at up to $44.6 billion, Lambda at up to $41.3 billion — and named commitments reach roughly $637 billion. A further $125 billion to $150 billion of TPU capacity for 2028–31 is left out of the table, and some power and data-centre deals run 20 years with take-or-pay terms and uncapped fuel pass-throughs.
The customer side is a fraction of it
Remaining performance obligations — contracted revenue not yet recognised — stood at $10.8 billion on 30 June, about 75% of it due within a year. Against $430.6 billion of non-cancelable rent, that is a ratio of roughly 40 to 1, or about 13 years of revenue at the first half's annualised run rate.
The other side is not nothing: more than 11,900 customers spending at least $100,000 a year, 1,900 above $1 million, about 250 above $10 million, with 80% of revenue consumption-based and 48% flowing through cloud marketplaces. Cash was $112.4 billion.
Why a blank is worse than a big number
Within a day, at least five totals were circulating: about $430 billion counting only non-cancelable deals, $542 billion to $567 billion, about $637 billion for named contracts, $656 billion, and up to $808 billion once footnotes and uncommenced leases are folded in. Every one was assembled from components, because the total is not in the document. The income statement does the same thing: since 2025 Anthropic reports compute, personnel and partnerships instead of cost of revenue, gross profit, research and sales, so gross margin cannot be computed from it.
In fairness, a long contract is not a loss; it is a bet that usage compounds faster than rent escalates. The company's own measure is revenue per dollar of compute, $2.08 in the second quarter. And the commitments are not equally hard — the SpaceX, Nscale and Lambda deals are cancellable or capacity-contingent, which is why the totals disagree by hundreds of billions.
What is still unconfirmed
The total, plus the share count and price range beside it. Investors have discussed $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion; nothing is set, and marketing is reported for the week of 9 November. Also live: the Department of War's supply-chain risk designation from February, which the filing says could cause "material revenue losses" — a federal court in California preliminarily enjoined it, and Anthropic is also before the D.C. Circuit.
I will update this when an amendment fills in the total, and when the price range is set.
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