Anthropic this week published the official paperwork ahead of what could be a record-breaking stock market listing, Financial Times reports. Yet three numbers missing from the filing frame the biggest open questions about the company and the wider state of artificial intelligence amid rising anxiety on Wall Street.
The first question is how fast Anthropic is growing right now. Analysts calculated that month-to-month revenue growth swung from 88 per cent in February to just 4 per cent in September. The early surge was driven by Claude Code. Anthropic has called its Claude Sonnet 4.5 model its strongest for building such agents. But the later slowdown raised doubts about how deeply AI is spreading into business life. Unlike traditional software firms, 83 per cent of first-half revenue came from pay per use instead of subscriptions.
A trillion-dollar bet on computing power
The second question is whether Anthropic's giant bet on the future will pay off. The filing leaves blank how much the company has committed to spend on computing capacity. It details more than $650bn in deals, and some estimates put the total closer to $1tn, with commitments stretching to 2045. Rating agency Moody's recently valued the off-balance-sheet commitments of the five largest hyperscalers, the big cloud companies that run vast data centres, at $2.8tn.
The third question is whether recent price cuts will fuel a boom or a ruinous price war. Anthropic said one of its latest models completes AI tasks 40 per cent more cheaply than its predecessor, and it noted that an earlier price cut was followed by quarterly revenue growth rising from 48 to 132 per cent. Whether that experience still applies is unclear, as lower-priced rivals improve quickly.
This matters because the listing will test whether the AI boom rests on durable demand or on exuberance. Anthropic's filing shows unprecedented growth after only three years, with profit margins and cash flow stronger than most analysts had expected. What comes next, for the company and the industry, is far less clear.