Anthropic's S-1 Explained: Everything You Need to Know

Anthropic’s S-1 is finally public, giving investors their first real look under the hood of one of the most anticipated IPOs in years. We dig into the numbers behind the rumored $2 trillion valuation, Anthropic’s growth and profitability story, its massive AI compute commitments, and what the filing actually tells us about the economics of the business.

But some of the most interesting details aren’t sitting neatly on the balance sheet. We break down the nearly $800 billion of disclosed commitments tied to compute and infrastructure, why Anthropic may need the public markets more than people realize, and the very unusual assumptions investors may have to make to justify a valuation this large. Plus, we get into what the S-1 still doesn’t tell us, and the numbers we’re watching as Anthropic gets closer to an IPO.

Then we zoom out to what Anthropic’s IPO tells us about the broader AI trade: the neocloud selloff, CoreWeave, Meta’s latest capital-raising strategy, and the extraordinary amount of money required to fund the AI buildout. And because we can’t help ourselves, we get into Anthropic’s unusual share classes, the ticker $ANT, and why Instagram’s latest moves might tell us something much bigger about where Meta thinks the value of content really lies.

02:00 How Do You Value Anthropic at $2 Trillion? 03:00 Anthropic’s Business Model Is Changing 04:00 The Strange Metric Anthropic Wants Investors to Use 05:00 The Nearly $800 Billion Question 08:00 The AI & Neocloud Meltdown 10:00 Why Anthropic May NEED This IPO 11:00 Meta Is Raising Even More Money for AI 13:00 Anthropic’s Very Unusual Share Structure 15:00 Why Anthropic Chose the Ticker $ANT 17:00 Meta’s Latest Instagram Move 18:00 Is Content Creation Basically an MLM? 20:00 Why YouTube Pays and Instagram Doesn’t 22:00 The TikTokification of Instagram 24:00 How Social Media Algorithms Hook Creators 26:00 Want to See Someone’s Instagram? Unfollow Them 28:00 The Real Reason Meta Wants More Content