As Anthropic gears up for the largest IPO in history, investors are holding their breath for an IPO filing that could land as soon as October 23. When that happens, the headline numbers will be hard to miss: revenue, growth, and losses. Those numbers matter, but they won’t tell the whole story.
Important details will sit deep in the filing and can easily be overlooked by most investors. For Anthropic, key questions will center on the durability of its growth, gross margin trends, and the financial risk tied to its compute capacity.
Want help answering those questions? Join IPO Pro to unlock all nine numbers investors should be watching and exactly where to find them in the filing.
1. Reported revenue vs. run rate
Anthropic’s growth is often described in terms of “annualized revenue” or “run rate,” which takes a recent month or quarter and annualizes it. The company reportedly generated $4.6 billion in revenue in 2025 (+1,088% y/y), but now has an annualized run-rate (ARR) of $65 billion based on its July revenue.
For a company growing this quickly, ARR will produce a figure far larger than the revenue it actually earned over the past year, but smaller than what it expects to generate over the next 12 months. If you see a headline proclaim “Anthropic seeks a valuation of 100x revenue,” be sure you understand which revenue figure is being used.
Where to look: Statement of Operations and Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financials (MD&A). Both will have GAAP revenue for the fiscal years and any stub periods. Annualized revenue is not a required disclosure, but may be in the MD&A or Business sections; it can be calculated by multiplying the latest quarterly revenue by four.
4. Compute commitments
Anthropic’s leaked S-1 reportedly revealed that it has more than $500 billion in cloud infrastructure commitments over the next decade, to Broadcom, Google, Amazon, xAI, Microsoft, and AMD.
Compute commitments help Anthropic secure capacity, but they also create risk. While the company primarily has a usage-based revenue model, on the expense side it signs multiyear take-or-pay contracts with hyperscalers. If demand keeps climbing, locking in compute will look wise. If demand decelerates, or newer chips make today’s infrastructure less valuable, Anthropic would still be on the hook for the contracted spending.
Where to look: The footnotes to the financial statements, under Commitments and Contingencies. You’ll also find a discussion of contractual obligations in the MD&A, including under Liquidity and Capital Resources. Look at the full multiyear total, not just the next 12 months, and note which cloud and data center partners are named. For this level of off-balance sheet commitments, it will also likely be highlighted in the Risk Factors.
8. Useful life of AI hardware
To the extent Anthropic owns servers, chips, and networking equipment, this accounting assumption spreads the cost over the equipment’s estimated useful life rather than expensing it upfront. It can have a large effect on reported earnings. A longer useful life means lower annual depreciation and higher near-term profits, but it may prove optimistic if new generations of chips make current equipment obsolete sooner than expected.
Where to look: The Significant Accounting Policies footnote, under property and equipment. Also check whether the estimated useful life has changed between periods.
