Reported by The Verge AI
Anthropic faces intense competitive pressure and huge fixed costs. Can Claude build itself fast enough to succeed?
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The Anthropic S-1 seems to have provided the financial justification for the company to spend as much as it possibly can on compute. If you are the kind of person who wonders if Anthropic is doing its level best to build a machine god while convincing Wall Street it’s in the business of selling IT contracts, Anthropic has just offered a handy solution: Doing a bunch of things that look like you’re trying to build the machine god is the only way to avoid going bankrupt.
More from the original report
Forget about the machine god for a minute. At least in my read of the S-1, it seems like Anthropic is pinning the future of its company to dramatic growth; it has to, in order to meet its fixed costs. You don’t have to be an AI skeptic to lift an eyebrow at these numbers. But if you are skeptical that dramatic recursive self-improvement is possible — in the way the business plan seems to require — this doesn’t look like a good investment.
Let’s start with the good news for Anthropic fans. The company’s revenue grew fourteen times to $16.3 billion between the first half of 2026 and the first half of 2025. There’s an $80 billion loss, but it’s largely an accounting thing that isn’t relevant to the underlying business . If we remove that, and some other charges, including employee compensation, we’re looking at $1.62 billion in adjusted income in the first half of 2026. I’ve asked before if AI can make enough money to pay for itself , and the answer from Anthropic’s S-1 appears to be, at least for this company, at least right now, yes.
Anthropic was considerably more disciplined than OpenAI or Elon Musk, and it seems to be paying off. (Anthropic names only OpenAI and Google as rivals. Better luck next time, Elon!) The company has never released an AI image generator, an…