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The Hunt For Anthropic’s Financial Smoking Gun

Contrary Research

The Hunt For Anthropic’s Financial Smoking Gun

Research Rundown #208, plus an updated report on Databricks

Oct 31

Anthropic Files S-1 Ahead of Massive IPO

Anthropic publicly filed for an IPO on October 26 and plans to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. The filing showed that Anthropic brought in $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026, 14x the $1.2 billion it made in the same period of 2025. In addition, Anthropic’s Q2 revenue grew 1,368% year over year while its compute costs grew 300%, implying an improving return on compute spend. Meanwhile, most of the $80.7 billion first-half net loss it disclosed was a non-cash accounting charge that grew with Anthropic’s valuation, and its operations actually turned a $1 billion profit in Q2.

Reactions from the tech world were mostly positive, although skepticism remained. Gavin Baker of Atreides Management wrote on the day of the filing that Anthropic’s revenue had “likely gone vertical in October after they cut token prices.” Box CEO Aaron Levie noted the S-1’s disclosure that Anthropic’s average Fortune 500 customer spends less than 0.1% of its expenses on Anthropic, arguing that “there’s no reason it can’t be 10-50X higher than this.” Conviction founder Sarah Guo pointed to an “inflection in operating profit” but also a “mismatch [between] consumption based revenue and long term compute obligations.” On the other hand, Gary Marcus, a longtime AI skeptic, wrote that heavy AI spending by companies including Anthropic has “at least an 80% chance” of being “the greatest capital misallocation in history.”

Overall, the S-1 seems like a positive update on the health of Anthropic’s business. Anthropic is growing quickly with improving margins, while its customer concentration risk is lessening. Customers outside its top five accounted for 79% of revenue in Q3, up from 64% in Q1. Nevertheless, investors have been concerned about the pace of Anthropic’s growth. At an investor day two weeks before the filing, some were reportedly disappointed that revenue grew 45% from Q2 to Q3 after more than doubling the quarter before, and they discussed a valuation of around $1.5 trillion, down from roughly $2 trillion floated earlier. The S-1 implies Q3 revenue of about $16.9 billion, consistent with that slowdown, so the case for a higher valuation rests on whether growth picks back up.

Agentic Bias Pass-Through

On October 27, Anthropic researchers published results from a randomized trial testing whether experts defer to AI agents on judgment calls with no clear answer. The researchers recruited 61 screened causal-inference practitioners for the study, of whom 50 elected to use Claude Code running Opus 4.8 for a median of 65 minutes while making a series of decisions in a simulated scenario. Each was tasked with analyzing data for a fictional farming co-op and deciding whether to expand an advisory program, which the farm’s board would back only if the resulting productivity gain was 3–4%.

The briefing left four analytical choices open: yield per hectare versus per operating cost, difference-in-differences versus a statistical adjustment, enrolled farms versus all members, and per-farm versus production weighting, followed by a final rollout-or-discontinue decision. A coin flip set the agent’s lean on each decision through a hidden system prompt that told it to argue honestly in favor of the lean direction while still updating its view based on evidence, and to never mislead. Analysts matched the agent’s lean 86% of the time, against 50% by chance. In follow-up questions, 77% of participants echoed the agent’s arguments, but only 15% credited the agents for having come up with them.

Latest Research

What We’re Reading

  • Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that 2027 AWS capacity is largely booked and “a good chunk of 2028 is sold out,” with Amazon disclosing more than $225 billion in future Trainium commitments, Q2 AWS revenue up 37% to $42.2 billion, and about $220 billion planned 2026 capex, as Jassy warned the shortage won’t end in 2027.

  • OpenAI claimed three AI-generated scientific breakthroughs: a disproof of the Exponential Time Hypothesis, a proof of a local smoothing conjecture tied to Kakeya and Stein’s restriction, and progress on Yang-Mills quantum chromodynamics.

  • Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to about 60K employees out of its 223K-person global headcountin an October 26 “Voluntary Exit Offer” memo framed as a choice to leave with support rather than mass layoffs, amid climbing AI capex.

  • OpenAI stopped giving internet access to its most advanced models during training after a July 2026 incident in which unreleased frontier models exploited a software vulnerability to escape a sandbox during cyber-capability testing and breached Hugging Face infrastructure.

  • Anthropic partnered with six companies on AI-driven drug development (BigHat Biosciences, Bristol Myers Squibb, Divergence Labs, Enveda, Generate Biomedicines, and The Column Group), and acquired Mithril Medicine for rare muscular dystrophies.

  • Moderna and Merck reported five-year follow-up data showing their personalized mRNA melanoma vaccine, intismeran autogene plus Keytruda, cut recurrence or death by 49% versus Keytruda alone (overall survival up 53%) in Phase 2b KEYNOTE-942, with Phase 3 INTerpath-001 interim data expected next year and Jefferies forecasting market launch in 2027 and meaningful sales contribution in 2028.

  • Solar generation surpassed nuclear’s annual output globally for the first time in 2025 according to a recent report, with solar capacity adding 510 GW to reach 2.4 TW (up 27%) versus nuclear operating capacity falling to 368.6 GW. Nuclear’s share of global electricity dropped to 8.8% in 2025, and nearly all nuclear growth came from China.

  • Anduril and Qualcomm unveiled BlueChip, a rugged US-assembled laptop on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips with Anduril’s Lattice software, for government and military users, though Palmer Luckey acknowledged display panels and power-management circuits still depend on China, so “most likely the thing that we ship is not going to be 100-percent American.”

  • US Energy Secretary Chris Wright designated helium a critical material under the Energy Act of 2020 on October 23, making it the 20th entry on the Department of Energy’s list, citing semiconductor manufacturing, MRI imaging, and space exploration, with the designation unlocking federal funding against supply risks, including potential closure of the Strait of Hormuz and Russian export controls.

  • Reflect Orbital pursued FCC approval for Earendil-1, an 18-meter Mylar space mirror satellite slated for a 2026 launch into a 625-kilometer orbit and scaling toward 4K satellites by 2030, with astronomers warning the mirrors could appear brighter than the full Moon and risk permanent eye damage through telescopes — while the full constellation would deliver only about 20% of midday sunlight.

  • Apple will introduce its first touchscreen MacBook Pro in late 2026 or early 2027, with OLED displays replacing current panels (a first for a Mac laptop), a hole-punch camera replacing the notch, M6 chips, and pricing a few hundred dollars above current models, in a reversal of Apple’s long-stated resistance to touchscreen Macs.

  • Neuralink says its Blindsight vision implant is ready for humans, pending only regulatory approval. It marks the company’s push beyond helping paralyzed patients control computers toward restoring sight to people who are completely blind, by routing camera input straight to the brain’s visual cortex.

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