Anthropic drops S-1, Microsoft offers buyouts to 60K staff
Mon, Oct 26
Tomorrow's events: Oracle AIWorld (day 3); Earnings: PYPL, HOOD, NXPI; The Information's WTF Summit; Ripple Swell
top news
@levie: This is the key stat. The average Fortune 500 customer of Anthropic spends less than .1% of their expenses on Anthropic. While that number likely will eventually asymptote somewhere (token prices coming down, and other large enterprise spend areas not going away), there's no reason it can't be 10-50X higher than this, reaching a “mere” 1-5% of spend. Which would still be a fraction of what most startups are spending. Thus, you can see how big of a divide there is between the frontier users of AI and the rest of the world still. @danprimack: For sake of argument, let's say Anthropic seeks to raise $100 billion (even if the S-1 doesn't include a target, per the new fashion). Then add in Meta's $95 billion and SpaceX's $40 billion. That would be 0.72% of U.S. GDP. @semianalysis_: The most mind blowing stat we've seen so far is this: “As of June 30, 2026, we had raised an aggregate of $141.1 billion of capital and had cash and cash equivalents of $112.4 billion and short-term investments of $19.3 billion.” That means to date, they have burned 9.7b, they are growing at a rapid pace, and are profitable on an operating income basis as of the June quarter! This is likely the most efficient scaling of a business in the history of capitalism.- Anthropic S-1: an $80.7B net loss on revenue of $16.3B in H1 2026, up from a $13B net loss on revenue of $1.2B in H1 2025, and a net revenue retention of 900% (Bloomberg)
- Anthropic S-1: of its $81B net loss in H1 2026, $72B+ was related to rising convertible note value as its valuation increased and nearly $9B to compute (Financial Times)
- Sources: Anthropic is aiming to go public the week of November 16 and could raise ~$100B at a $1.5T to $2T valuation, after initially preparing for October (Wall Street Journal)
- Few VC firms are mentioned in Anthropic's S-1, except Spark, which invested ~$800M across six rounds and whose GP Yasmin Razavi is the sole VC on its board (Kate Clark / Wall Street Journal)
- Anthropic S-1: it spent just $482M on capex in H1 2026, leasing most of its compute, and its capex is almost entirely outsourced via $782B in lease obligations (Tim Culpan / Culpium)
- S-1: as of September 30, Anthropic had 11,900+ customers spending $100,000+ annually, 1,900+ customers spending $1M+, and ~250 customers spending $10M+ (Rebecca Bellan / TechCrunch)
@amanda_goodall: ...From my understanding, Microsoft uses an internal leveling system to classify employees by seniority, responsibility, and compensation. Roughly speaking: Levels 59-62: Engineers, analysts, and professional roles Levels 63-64: Senior engineers and managers Levels 65-67: Principal engineers and senior management Levels 68-70: Partner-level technical leaders, directors, and senior directors... So it is easy to see here that this is not simply about trimming junior employees or eliminating jobs AI can perform..... we're potentially talking about some very experienced, highly compensated technical and management talent.SPONSOR The best sales leaders aren't job hunting. Here's how to reach them without months of cold outreach. — Our team came from Box, Square, and Brex, so we already know the GTM leaders worth meeting.
Meta plans to raise $95B to finance its AI infrastructure, including $35B in public equity offerings, backed by cornerstone investors Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom (Tim Bradshaw / Financial Times)
@danprimack: “I want to talk to you about the ginormous new AI financing deal announced today?” “Which one? Meta, Anthropic or SpaceX?” @dariocpx: The situation in the debt market is so bad that $META is now planning to issue over $50 bn of shares to raise funds to carry on with the AI CAPEX spending plans. Some people might say shareholders dilution will be small so it's ok, however IT IS NOT OK because after this round Meta will need $ 600 bn more to reach its goal and if debt markets remain shut its shareholders are going to see themselves significantly diluted in the process (because the stock will also go down a lot in the meantime) @stocksavvyshay: I definitely didn't expect $META to rally 5% after announcing plans to raise up to $95B in equity to fund its massive AI buildout. I guess that's what happens when folks start seeing Muse as an AI application winner and focus more on what it could eventually earn rather than how much Meta needs to spend to scale it.AI cybersecurity startup Cathedral says it breached Anthropic's data and messaging systems, under a program inviting outside experts to test Anthropic's systems (Washington Post)
Sources: DoorDash is in advanced talks to acquire Instacart, and the deal could be finalized as soon as this week and could value Instacart at ~$17B (Heather Haddon / Wall Street Journal)
artificial intelligence
- Anthropic's S-1 lists 94 pages of risk factors and warns that the “scale of harm” from a “catastrophic” AI incident might mean it is unable to obtain insurance (Wall Street Journal)
- S-1: Anthropic outlines its mission to revolutionize sectors like medicine and warns its corporate behavior may diverge from traditional profit-maximization (Robert Hart / The Verge)
- S-1: Anthropic warns prospective investors that its AI safety and advocacy stances risk disproportionate and selective targeting from the Trump administration (Maria Curi / Axios)
Anthropic's IPO outlines an unusual succession plan: confidential, ranked lists of up to 10 successors per co-founder, subject to approval from five co-founders (Anna Tong / Forbes)
- Anthropic's S-1 shows a governance structure that suits a fun quirky little mission-driven worker cooperative that needs to raise billions as a public company (Matt Levine / Bloomberg)
- Anthropic S-1: post-IPO, it will keep operating as a Public Benefit Corporation, giving its seven co-founders 50.1% voting control via a single Class F share (Deborah Mary Sophia / Reuters)
Elvis Presley's music owners sue Anthropic for allegedly using 274 songs to train its models, seeking $41M+; Anthropic says it disagrees and will defend itself (Derrick Bryson Taylor / New York Times)
A look at OpenAI's and Anthropic's aggressive price cuts from June through September, driven by low switching costs and pricing pressure from open-weight models (Max Woolf's Blog)
Amazon Bee Frontier review: a $75 AI wearable with a single button that excels at always-on listening, summarizing conversations, and suggesting follow-up ideas (M.G. Siegler / Spyglass)
A profile of former Google VP and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, whose startup Dazzle is building an AI assistant to help normal people tackle mundane tasks visually (Alexandra Alter / New York Times)
Google DeepMind's AI hurricane forecasting model outperformed conventional models by accurately predicting that Hurricane Isaias would make landfall in Florida (Jessica Meszaros / NPR)
AI processors
semiconductors
Intel agrees to acquire Tel Aviv-based quantum computing startup Classiq; Classiq has raised more than $200M in funding and has about 130 employees (Ian King / Bloomberg)
public listings
funding deals
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Microsoft and others push out emergency patches for a critical flaw in Brotli, the C decoder library built into Node.js, that could allow remote code execution (Bill Toulas / BleepingComputer)
Instagram is testing Features, a new long-form horizontal video format of up to 90 minutes aimed at podcasters, comedians, and other creators, in the US (Caitlin Huston / The Hollywood Reporter)
SPONSOR Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.
Apple debuts iOS 27.2, with Siri AI enhancements for recalling past conversations, understanding more personal context, supporting five more languages, and more (Juli Clover / MacRumors)
A look at Toyota's robotics push, from its Walden spinoff to its $6.4B annual plan to deploy 400K factory robots, as it competes with Tesla, Xpeng, and Hyundai (Financial Times)
Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses review: no camera can be a selling point, audio quality is good, and Meta AI works well, but privacy concerns remain and it's pricey (Samantha Kelly / Bloomberg)
Fitbit Edge review: notable upgrade over the Charge 6 for GPS and heart rate, Google Health app is an improvement, but lacks software polish and NFC payments (Ray Maker / DC Rainmaker)
Inside Slack's Salesforce culture clash: Benioff didn't use Slack and had ~1 hour with CEO Butterfield pre-deal; Butterfield quit after a Davos will.i.am panel (Johnny Rodgers / Building Slack)
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