Anthropic investors may be missing $150bn warning ahead of IPO - The News International

Anthropic's operating loss shrank from more than $2 billion in the first half of 2025 to under $700 million this year. Ed Elson thinks you're reading too much into that. The Prof. G Markets co-host, who trades as a retail investor himself, told Business Insider that the Anthropic IPO filing contains details many buyers are missing.

Anthropic plans to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. A November debut has been reported, but no date is confirmed.

According to him, investors have placed too much emphasis on the lower loss. The S-1 shows that the operating loss for the first half of 2026 is estimated to be $693 million compared to $2.14 billion in the previous year.

The company has incurred costs worth $8.9 billion on compute and infrastructure in the first half of this year. But Elson sees a much bigger number coming up: about $150 billion for next year, according to his estimate.

These expenses are not currently active and cannot be recorded in an income statement. But he believes this is going to happen soon.

This form of reporting, the S-1, takes up close to 300 pages, and Elson points out that the information is all over the place. In particular, Elson cites page 161, where the “Liquidity and Capital Resources” heading precedes a long list of anticipated computer investments.

Anthropic works with cloud competitors such as Google, so it plans to expand its capacity even more than before. So far, capital investment has been modest, but it will skyrocket according to Elson’s expectations. He praises Anthropic for reporting capital investment but finds it is the hard part.

The revenue is now at 16.3 billion in the first half, compared to 1.2 billion in the same period last year. The company earned an operating profit for the first time, 974 million, in the second quarter. At 30 June, Anthropic had 131.7 billion in cash.