Humanity can't afford not to spend $800B on AI, Anthropic insists

Anthropic's IPO filing dropped on Monday morning, and the prospectus reads like a real estate agent desperately trying to sell a house of cards as an investment property: The upsides are enormous. There are just a few disclosures you should be aware of. Sure, the foundation is cracked; it's in a flood plain, and you can only really afford it if you land that promotion, but there's a non-zero chance it'll work out eventually, and just look at the views. Every S1's risk factors read a bit like a doomsday prophecy. Anthropic, like any other company that's going to trade on public markets, has to cover its butt. It doesn't change the fact that the company's success is built on a gamble that its revenues will grow fast enough to keep up with its rampant compute spend, for which its obligations now exceed half a trillion dollars over the next decade or so. Burn, baby, burn Going off the S1 filing's numbers, things don't look that bad for the Claudefather at first blush. Revenues in the first half of 2026 outpaced compute and infrastructure costs by nearly 2:1 and operating losses were a relatively paltry $693 million, compared with $2.14 billion in the first half of last year. The company is still burning money, but things are finally headed in the right direction. Or, they would be if the company's compute spend were forecast to plateau over the next few years. That's very much not the case. "Our ability to develop, train, improve, and deploy frontier models depends on our access to enormous and increasing quantities of specialized compute," the prospectus reads. The continued development of Anthropic's models hinges on ever larger quantities of compute. Anthropic hasn't put a firm number on its compute commitments involving large cloud providers, neoclouds, and equipment providers, but the company's obligations over the next few years could be north of $800 billion, depending on how you wrangle the numbers. According to the S-1, Anthropic entered into new or amended compute and infrastructure agreements after December 31, 2025, carrying roughly $417 billion in future minimum payment obligations. Since June 30, 2026, the company has entered into further new or amended agreements carrying approximately $245 billion in future minimum payment obligations, some of which are subject to contractual conditions. But if you add up all the contracts listed, the total is even higher. Microsoft: "at least $44.9B" — 2026-2033 Google: "at least $114.5B" — 2026-2033 TPUs …