Anthropic Needs to Disclose Its Tokenomics Before Its IPO

Ilan Strauss and Tim O’Reilly are co-directors of the AI Disclosures Project.

In this photo illustration, the icon for the AI app "Claude" by Anthropic is seen through running water as it is displayed on a digital screen on September 16, 2026 in London, England. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)

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When Anthropic filed its S-1 statement on October 26, it gave us our first largely audited look into the financials of one of the world’s leading AI companies. An amended filing on Monday added third-quarter results. This S-1 is only a preliminary submission, however, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) can request additional information.

Anthropic’s filing will establish a precedent for other AI labs preparing to go public. What it leaves out may therefore matter just as much as what it discloses. Two disclosure gaps stand out. Together, they make the AI market more opaque, increase financial risk and fragility, and undermine the efficient allocation of capital. The SEC should exercise its authority in the public interest to request additional information to address these gaps.

The first concerns Anthropic’s relationships with the firms that finance it, distribute its models, and sell it computing power. More than 40% of its revenue comes through the cloud marketplaces of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, which offer Anthropic’s Claude models to their own cloud customers. Yet Anthropic does not disclose how much it pays each of them or how much it earns through each. It also has not yet filed with its S-1 the contracts to buy computing power from these companies, despite SEC rules requiring disclosure of contracts on which a business is substantially dependent.

The second disclosure gap concerns the “token”: a small piece of text or other data processed by a model, and the unit in which most of Anthropic’s usage-based sales are billed. The filing does not report token volumes (how many tokens Anthropic’s models processed for customers) or revenue and costs per token. It also does not say how much of the computing capacity Anthropic has contracted for has been delivered or is in use. The SEC already requires oil and gas producers to report how much oil and gas they produce, the average price they receive for each, and the average cost of producing a barrel of oil or its equivalent in gas, all using common definitions. Frontier AI developers need the same, including a common definition of a token, so investors can compare revenue and costs per token across companies.

Existing SEC rules can largely close the first gap. The second calls for standardized disclosures specific to the AI industry. Anthropic’s revenue is growing extraordinarily quickly, yet investors still cannot assess whether the computing capacity behind that growth will earn a return.

Disclosure matters all the more because ordinary shareholders will have limited influence over the company’s governance. After the IPO, Anthropic’s seven founders will hold 50.1% of votes on general shareholder matters, while the Long-Term Benefit Trust (an independent body of five trustees with no financial stake in the company) will select four of the seven directors. This unusual division of control strengthens the case for transparent, comparable disclosure.

The S-1 filing gives outsiders their first audited annual accounts for Anthropic, alongside unaudited results for the first nine months of 2026. The filing reports revenue of $4.6 billion in 2025 and $33.2 billion in the first nine months of 2026, including $17.0 billion in the third quarter alone.

But is Anthropic profitable? Its headline net loss of $104.0 billion for the first nine months of 2026 is largely a noncash accounting consequence of its rising valuation. Most of this loss ($94.3 billion) comes from convertible notes (loans from investors that will turn into shares) and similar contracts. As the company’s valuation rose, the shares it owes these investors became worth more. Accounting rules count that rise as a loss, though no cash is paid out.

The underlying business tells a different story. Anthropic lost $1.7 billion from operations in the first quarter of 2026, but made its first quarterly operating profit in the second: $974 million, or about 8 cents on each dollar of revenue. Over the nine months, $2.4 billion in interest on its cash and investments more than covered its $1.3 billion operating loss, not counting those much larger accounting charges.

Anthropic typically contracts for computing capacity 12 to 18 months ahead, so its near-term costs are largely fixed. This resembles airlines leasing aircraft: payments begin when the planes arrive, whether or not the seats are full. Profits then depend on filling that capacity at sufficiently high prices. In the second quarter, Anthropic’s compute costs rose 64% from the first quarter, while revenue jumped 144%. The amended filing shows how quickly results can swing. In the third quarter, compute costs rose 77% while revenue rose 47%. The $974 million operating profit became a $567 million loss, mainly because of $5 billion of short-term compute expenses, priced well above its long-term contracts, and a $2 billion noncash charge for matching employees’ charitable donations with company shares.

Anthropic’s business model is changing though, and with it the meaning of its reported profits. Until recently, it predominantly purchased computing services from cloud providers such as Amazon and Google, recording expenses as capacity became available. It is now increasingly leasing computing equipment directly, including $161 billion in five-year equipment leases with Broadcom. These are treated more like investments in equipment, much as an oil company treats a new well: their costs are spread out over several years, with the interest on the leases recorded separately from operating profit.

Anthropic puts its leases and purchase commitments at a staggering $895 billion. Yet its balance sheet shows just $4.5 billion in lease liabilities, because leases are recorded only once the equipment is ready for use, and purchase commitments not at all.

This will make Anthropic’s future operating profits challenging to interpret. Rising operating margins will not necessarily mean less cash is being committed to computing infrastructure.

In the first nine months of 2026, Anthropic recorded 57 cents in compute and infrastructure costs per dollar of revenue. Personnel accounted for another 15 cents. Sales, marketing, and partnerships cost another 17 cents, much of it in fees to cloud marketplaces distributing Claude.The trouble in tracking these flows is that Amazon and Google are simultaneously distributors of Claude through their own marketplaces, investors in Anthropic, and suppliers of its compute.

As distributors: In the first nine months of 2026, 44% of Anthropic’s revenue came through Amazon, Google, and Microsoft cloud marketplaces. Anthropic books these sales at the full customer price and pays the cloud providers distribution fees, although it does not disclose what share of the price they keep.

As investors: In 2026, Google bought nearly $20 billion of Anthropic’s preferred stock and Amazon bought $10 billion, and both have arrangements for further billions in future financing.

As compute suppliers: Anthropic has committed to spending at least $121.3 billion with Google, $110 billion with Amazon, and $44.9 billion with Microsoft on compute over multiyear contracts extending into the 2030s. These are mostly future spending commitments. The Google and Amazon agreements require minimum payments through 2033 and 2036, respectively. Subject to exceptions, Anthropic must pay any shortfall if spending falls below those minimums. By contrast, its own revenue, the filing notes, is “primarily consumption-based, and much of it is not subject to long-term contractual commitments.”

What the filing leaves out about Anthropic’s cloud contracts and future payment obligations can largely be addressed through existing SEC disclosure rules. We made this case a year ago in Tech Policy Press.

Shortly after we published our recommendations, in December 2025, the SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee, a body Congress created to advise the agency, published its own recommended AI disclosure guidance. It built on existing disclosure rules and argued that a separate set of AI disclosure rules may not be necessary. Even so, it describes its recommendations as only the “initial scaffolding” of a framework that “may be further built upon as technology develops.”

In light of Anthropic’s S-1, two pressing disclosure obligations stand out:

First, Anthropic should file its main compute contracts. Under SEC rules (Item 601(b)(10) of Regulation S-K), a company must file with the SEC any contract its business is “substantially dependent” on, including contracts to buy “the major part” of what it needs. Yet Anthropic has not filed its compute deals with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, or SpaceX’s AI unit (formerly xAI). Each of the first three commits it to at least $44.9 billion, more than its revenue through September 2026. The SpaceX deals commit it to spend up to $120.5 billion.

Beyond filing the contracts, Anthropic should ideally disclose the money it pays to and receives from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, partner by partner: what each invests in Anthropic, what Anthropic pays them, and what Anthropic earns through their marketplaces. SEC rules already require a company to discuss commitments that could materially affect its cash position or revenue and to add any material information needed to keep the filing from being misleading. And the contract-filing rule lets a company withhold contract terms only when those terms are not material, meaning a reasonable investor would not consider them important. Given how central these relationships are to Anthropic’s revenue and computing supply, their materiality is difficult to dismiss.

Second, and arguably more consequential, Anthropic should show how much of its future compute spending it is legally bound to pay. The amended filing puts its compute commitments at roughly $895 billion. About $214 billion of that can be canceled or depends on conditions, such as partners securing financing. A further $150 billion to $175 billion in estimated payments, for deals with no fixed dollar amount, is left out of that total. The filing provides a rough timeline for when these commitments fall due, but investors need to know how much Anthropic must actually pay, and what happens if revenue growth disappoints. The SEC could easily press for greater transparency before the IPO. Item 303(b)(1) of Regulation S-K is a natural lever: it requires companies to explain how much cash they will need to meet their contracts and other known obligations.

Beyond these immediate demands, the SEC should apply the successful cybersecurity disclosure model to material AI risks and safety incidents. The SEC began issuing cybersecurity guidance in 2011 and introduced dedicated requirements in 2023; AI disclosure could follow the same approach, we argued in previous research. This would mean adding a dedicated AI section to the annual 10-K report and reporting material AI incidents as they happen through 8-K filings – the reports companies must file after major events.

Anthropic’s S-1 provides some helpful operating measures, including customer retention and the number of large customers. But three other gaps make the economics of its business difficult to evaluate:

Existing SEC rules can largely close the gaps above. But some figures, such as token volumes, the cost of serving each token, and how fully computing capacity is used, need standard definitions written for the AI industry. The SEC already sets tailored requirements for oil and gas producers, mining companies, and banks, because each makes money in a different way.

The oil and gas rules are probably the closest parallel. Like an AI developer, an