When Anthropic’s S-1 went public on Oct 26, the headline number was a $974 million operating profit on $11.6 billion of second-quarter revenue. It also came with what we tallied as roughly $800 billion in compute commitments, including up to $120.5 billion owed to Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI.
Monday’s amendment filled in the blanks, and it’s not looking any better. Third-quarter revenue came in at $16.96 billion, up 1,127% from a year earlier. But operating profit lasted exactly one quarter, with Q3 swinging back to a $567 million GAAP operating loss as Anthropic paid up for $5 billion of short-term compute. Its committed spend is now officially $895.4 billion – more than $1 trillion once deals without a fixed dollar figure are counted – and $69.8 billion of it comes due in the next 12 months, more than the company’s entire annualized revenue run rate.
Let me get this straight: Anthropic made just under $1 billion in profit for one quarter (it’s first profitable quarter), yet it has committed to spending an additional $1 trillion, so it only needs 250 years of similar profits or so to pay off its projected capital costs!
Of course, Anrthopic is counting on continuous exponential revenue growth to pull its chestnuts out of the fire.
Wishing really hard is not a business plan.
But wait! We haven’t even scratched the surface of the crazy yet.
Here are ten disclosures that should raise eyebrows.
1. Your Vote Won’t Count
As we laid out last week, public buyers receive Class A shares and very little say. The Long-Term Benefit Trust – five financially disinterested trustees holding a single Class T share with no economic rights – elects a majority of the board. Meanwhile, a single Class F share held by the co-founders’ Founder LLC casts 50.1% of the vote on everything else, including the remaining board seats. Class A holders will be generally unable to change the outcome of any stockholder vote or director election “regardless of how they vote,” the filing concedes. The lone exception occurs if a majority of the founders deadlock among themselves, in which case Class F votes are cast proportionally to the Class A vote.
So you theoretically own a share of the airplane, but you never get a vote on where it’s going. If I wasn’t already a hard pass before, I would be now.
Also buried in the fine print: the co-founders have each pledged to donate 80% of their personal Anthropic equity to charity – pledges the S-1 describes as voluntary, revocable, and not legally binding.
But they totally pinky-sweared!
As the founders give shares away, their economic stake shrinks while their voting control through the Founder LLC remains intact.
This is not “stakeholder governance.”
The recipient charities are free to sell that stock, which the filing flags as another potential overhang on the share price. Anthropic will also qualify as a “controlled company” under Nasdaq rules, exempting it from standard governance requirements under a structure it notes has no direct public-company precedent.
This sounds less like a company and more like a conceptual comedy skit by the late Andy Kaufman as a satire of corporate management.
2. Profits Optional, Sentience Unknown
Because Anthropic is a public benefit corporation, its directors are required to balance shareholders’ financial interests against those of stakeholders affected by its conduct and its stated Company Purpose – a mandate the S-1 plainly states may not maximize stockholder value. The filing cites several commercial sacrifices already made: refusing to allow its models to be used for fully autonomous weapons or mass surveillance despite the lucrative revenue at stake; initially releasing Mythos solely as a gated research preview through Project Glasswing; and forgoing image- and video-generation models entirely to dedicate compute to research and safety.
The filing also points to the growing debate over whether AI systems could develop sentience or moral status. Given its internal stance on model sentience and moral status, Anthropic says it could impose limits on how it develops, deploys, or modifies its models that go beyond legal requirements, further curbing their commercial potential. Put simply, prospective shareholders are being warned that Claude’s potential moral status could one day cost them money.
I’m pretty sure that Ford isn’t warning potential investors that profits may be impaired by F-150s suddenly being declared human beings.
3. Washington Has Already Hit The Off Switch Once
In June, the Commerce Department imposed worldwide export restrictions on Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Anthropic disabled both models for every customer until the curbs were lifted following updates to its safeguards. The S-1 warns that other models could face the same – or similar – restrictions down the road.
Then there is the Pentagon. In February, after Anthropic stated its technology should not be used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons, the President directed all federal agencies to stop using its products. Simultaneously, the Secretary of War ordered the company designated a supply-chain risk, barring defense contractors from conducting any commercial activity with Anthropic. The Department of War also suggested early this year that it could invoke the Defense Production Act to force Anthropic to strip out those usage limits, the S-1 discloses.
The resulting legal battle is split. A federal judge in California initially ...
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