Wall Street gets a peak inside Anthropic

Investors have been eager to peek under the hood of Anthropic ahead of its anticipated Wall Street debut.

(Kent Nishimura/Getty Images) Hey Snackers, The Los Angeles Dodgers were favorites to win this year’s World Series. And when they were surprisingly swept by the Milwaukee Brewers, it wasn’t just the team that lost – businesses around Dodger stadium also saw potential revenue evaporate. Fortune reports that a restaurant group that runs bars near the stadium prepared for exactly that possibility by placing a $60,000 trade on Kalshi that the Dodgers would not advance. The trade, which doubled in value after LA’s playoff exit, helped to fill the hole in the group’s revenue from all the Dodger’s fans who now won’t be packing bars before or during World Series games.  Stocks finished Wednesday up. AI ECON Anthropic's eye-popping IPO numbers Investors have been eager to peek under the hood of Anthropic ahead of its anticipated Wall Street debut, which could value the AI company at around $2 trillion. The Wall Street Journal got their hands on an early draft of Anthropic’s hotly anticipated S-1, which paints a picture of a company with surging revenues but also sky-high compute costs and a medley of risk factors. Here are some highlights: Revenue is growing at an impressive rate: It reported $16.3 billion in revenue for the first half of this year, up from $1.1 billion in the same period a year earlier.  They are also spending a ton of money on compute. The company spent $9 billion on computing capacity and infrastructure in the first half of 2026, up from $2.3 billion spent on infrastructure during the same period in 2025. The company already agreed to pay $450 billion in cloud computing agreements over the next seven to ten years and it can’t back out of those. It warned it could potentially spend $750 billion “in the coming years,” per the Journal. It is in the red. The company reported a net loss of $80 billion during the first half of 2026, compared to a net loss of $13 billion a year earlier. Most of that loss is accounting charges; it still reported operating loss in H1 2026 but it was lower than the year before. Anthropic makes it very clear that it sees AI as a risky business. According to the Journal, “roughly a third” of the draft prospectus was dedicated to risk factors ranging from liability tied to potential data security incidents, models “blackmailing” people to the political risk tied to the backlash against data centers.  The CEO isn’t getting a Musk-sized pay day. Dario Amodei’s total compensation is $18 million, which is in line with the median pay for S&P 500 companies but less than many of his Big Tech peers. THE TAKEAWAY Anthropic’s numbers scooped by the Journal give a rare glimpse at the precise economics of running an AI company.  The good news is Anthropic’s revenue, as of June 30, is growing faster than its costs. The bad news is that its costs are really high. Anthropic needs to convince investors that its revenues are going to keep growing faster than its enormous spending commitments.  But, as Bloomberg’s Parmy Olson recently pointed out, the price of building AI models keeps going up while the price tag on AI products keeps going down. Anthropic can't guarantee that its revenue will keep soaring, but it's already committed to paying hundreds of billions of dollars for computing power. “That doesn’t necessarily mean a bursting bubble, but it does look like the real power increasingly lies with the companies that distribute and power the technology: cloud giants like Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.,” Olson wrote.  — J. Edward Moreno CHART OF THE DAY Holiday Hiring Rush Amazon’s annual holiday hiring surge is set to be bigger than ever, the e-commerce giant has announced. The company says it will hire over 300,000 seasonal, part-time, and full-time new employees to deal with the increase in orders it sees during the holiday shopping season. The yield on 10-year French government bonds hit 5% on Wednesday, as the nation’s borrowing costs spiked amid mass unrest that has turned violent at times.  What else we're Snackin' Larry Ellison went on a borrowing spree to fund his son’s takeover of Warner Bros., the Wall Street Journal reports.  Wall Street stock strategists have a new favorite word. The average US mortgage rate fell for the first time in 2 months, dropping to 7.41% from 7.5%. Coca-Cola bought Costa coffee for $5 billion, hoping to create a global self-serve coffee behemoth. It didn’t end up that way, Bloomberg reports, largely because espresso machines are more complex than soda vending machines.  Snack Fact of the Day Wearing a necktie can decrease blood flow to the brain by as much as 7.5%, a 2018 study found.  Thursday Lockheed Martin, TTM Technologies, and Procter & Gamble slated to release earnings ahead of the open. Postmarket earnings due out from Western Digital, Bloom Energy, and Comfort Systems USA. Craving more insights in your inbox? Subscribe to EntryPoint  and Scoreboard for quality reads. Sherwood Media, LLC produces fresh and unique perspectives on topical financial news and is a fully owned subsidiary of Robinhood Markets, Inc., and any views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of any other Robinhood affiliate... See more Sherwood Terms and Conditions Our Editorial Standards Contact Us Advertise With Us Unsubscribe Privacy Policy SHERWOOD MEDIA, LLC, 85 Willow Road, Menlo Park, CA 94025