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Anthropic is printing money, but AI isn’t paying off outside tech
Good morning. Today I’m reading about Netflix’s bloody week, playing with Apple Music’s fun new 404 page, mourning Arc’s untimely demise, and devouring Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel, Land.
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Anthropic is going public, and thanks to its S-1, we now have access to some of the mouthwatering numbers behind the IPO. In the first half of the year, the company reported $16.3 billion in revenue, up from $1.2 billion for the same period of 2025. If you’ve been following the AI phenomenon at all, you’ll know why: Anthropic’s Claude Code kicked off the AI coding boom in early 2026, causing every company from Google to OpenAI to largely pivot to the enterprise. By the summer we were talking about “token-maxxing” as Claude Fable 5.1 ate billions of tokens every day.
With a rumored valuation approaching $1.5 trillion, Anthropic’s IPO, when it does happen, will be the largest of all time, eclipsing SpaceXAI’s by billions of dollars. The interesting thing about the numbers, at least to me, is how much cash is on hand: of the $141 billion raised so far, it has over $112 billion remaining.
However, Anthropic has committed to spending hundreds of billions of dollars with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and SpaceX for cloud infrastructure, and expects to be compute-constrained over the next year. All of the major hyperscalers, including Google, have are prioritizing their own AI workloads over competitors’, meaning that Anthropic will be on the hunt for newer and potentially less reliable providers, with data centers largely powered by natural gas to keep costs down.
The data in this prospectus are truly outrageous. Anthropic did not exist until 2021 and was largely seen as an ideological research outfit until fairly recently. The notion that it would be one of the hottest stocks of ever was laughable, but here we are.
Conversely, a viral post by Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok last week is making the argument that except for tech, AI is not moving the needle.
In a number of compelling charts, Slok outlines the fact that while the Magnificent 7 are propping up the US economy, the rest of the country’s largest businesses — the S&P 493, as he calls them — are not seeing rising profits or meaningful productivity gains.
“Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence,” it begins, “the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech. There are still no signs of AI boosting productivity growth.”