Anthropic's business plan: become a god, or die on the way

Anthropic's S-1 shows that its revenue grew 14-fold to $16.3 billion between the first half of 2025 and the first half of 2026; the author argues that the document bets the company's future on sustained high-speed growth, and that growth is a precondition for fulfilling its compute commitments. The document discloses $1.62 billion in adjusted revenue and 900% net revenue retention in the first half of 2026, with about three-quarters of customers spending at least $100,000 per year; it also lists about $265.6 billion in non-cancelable purchase commitments, $321.4 billion in compute and infrastructure leases not yet begun, and about $245 billion in new agreements, from which the author estimates the 20-year commitment total at a minimum of about $850 billion. PitchBook analyst Harrison Rolfes estimates that from 2027 to 2030, about $90 billion per year in spending, corresponding to $188 billion in revenue, would be needed to maintain the cost ratio.