AI · 3 November 2026 · 6 min read

Anthropic’s amended prospectus puts the quarter at $16.96 billion. The operating profit did not last

Amendment No. 1, filed on 2 November, is the document behind the October investor-day briefing. Revenue was $16.96 billion in the third quarter, against $11.56 billion in the second. The net loss was $23.29 billion. An operating profit of $974 million the quarter before became an operating loss of $567 million, which the company ties to short-term computing that costs more than the long contracts.

Black letters spelling ANTHROPIC on a lit wall, with a blurred person in the foreground. — Reuters photograph of an Anthropic sign at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, during Dreamforce on 17 September 2026. It is a sign at a conference. It is not the filing.

The filing is Amendment No. 1 to the registration statement, dated 2 November. It is the first time the third quarter, which the 26 October prospectus left out, is in a document the public can read. Reuters, the same day, reported a net loss of $23.29 billion in the quarter, against $66.3 billion in the second, and revenue of $16.96 billion, against $11.56 billion. That is a 47 per cent rise on the quarter. The second quarter, Reuters said, had risen 144 per cent. A slower rate on a larger base is still a very large quarter. It is not the same thing as the room briefing this desk filed in October, which put the quarter at $16.8 billion and the profit on an adjusted basis that was never defined.

Dealroom’s reading of the same amendment puts the quarter at $16,956 million, against $1,382 million a year earlier, which is the 1,127 per cent year-on-year figure. Revenue for the first nine months, it says, citing CNBC and Axios, was $33.24 billion, against about $2.5 billion in the same months of 2025. The line that changes the story from the October meeting is the operating result. Dealroom says the company posted a $567 million operating loss, one quarter after an operating profit of $974 million, which was the only operating-profit quarter in the table. The company attributes the swing primarily to $5.0 billion of short-term computing that currently costs significantly more than the multi-year commitments, and to $2.0 billion of non-cash charges for matching donations. Reuters reported the $5 billion of extra computing cost, and said it reduced revenue per dollar of computing against the previous quarter. A loss that the company itself pins on expensive short-term capacity is a cost, not a rounding difference.

The bill is larger than the quarter

The commitments are the number that does not fit in a quarter. Reuters says the company carries $895.4 billion of computing commitments with partners including Amazon and Google. Nearly half of that, it says, is expected to fall due before 31 December 2030, and about $69.8 billion is due in the twelve months after 30 September 2026. Dealroom, reading the amendment, says the commitments are substantially all computing and infrastructure, about $447.5 billion of them by the end of 2030 and the rest from 2031 to 2045. It lists Broadcom at about $161 billion of equipment leases, Google at about $121 billion, up from $114.5 billion in the filing a week earlier, SpaceX’s AI unit at up to $120.5 billion, and Amazon at $110 billion. A further $125 billion to $150 billion of planned Google chips, and more than $20 billion with AMD, are not inside the $895.4 billion, Dealroom says, because those arrangements do not fix a dollar amount. A commitment without a fixed price is not a smaller commitment. It is one the table cannot add.

The older briefing asked for a prospectus with the revenue, the profit and a list of what “adjusted” removes. This amendment is that document for the revenue, and it answers the profit question by showing an operating loss. It does not turn the computing commitments into capacity that is already switched on. A contract to pay for chips through 2045 is not a chip that is in a rack tonight.