Anthropic spent about 58 cents on compute and infrastructure for every dollar of revenue in its third quarter. That is up from 48 cents in the second quarter, according to the company’s amended SEC filing.
The filing gives investors a closer look at the Claude developer’s costs before its planned stock market debut. It shows expenses rising faster than sales during the period.
Compute and infrastructure expenses climbed from $5.56 billion to $9.86 billion, an increase of about 77%. Revenue grew about 47% over the same stretch.
The 58-cent figure covers more than serving paying customers. It also includes computing used for research, model training, and internal operations, so it is not a profit margin on each prompt.
Price Cuts Weighed on Revenue Growth
Anthropic said higher usage drove revenue growth in the quarter. That growth was “partially offset by a decrease of approximately $600 million from price reductions introduced as part of new model versions and contractual discounts,” the filing said.
The $600 million is not money that disappeared from the company’s books. It is the amount by which lower prices and discounts reduced the gains that came from more usage.
Several recent releases lowered prices. Claude Opus 5.5 cut token prices compared with Opus 5, and Haiku 5.5, released in October, is aimed at cheaper, high-volume work.
Anthropic says Opus 5.5 lowered customers’ cost per task by about 40% compared with Opus 5. The company says Fable 5.1 reduced the cost of typical workloads by around 25%, helped in part by lower cache-read pricing.
These reductions come from both lower list prices and efficiency gains. They are not flat discounts across every task.
Anthropic says customers have usually increased their usage after past releases like these. Cheaper models can lead to more consumption overall.
Short-Term Compute Deals Drove a Loss
Anthropic usually reserves computing capacity 12 to 18 months before it becomes available. That makes much of its compute spending fixed in the near term.
During the third quarter, the company used $5 billion of compute under short-term commitments. Anthropic says that capacity cost more than similar capacity secured through multiyear contracts.
That expense helped move the company from a $974 million operating profit in the second quarter to a $567 million operating loss in the third. A noncash charge also affected the quarter’s results.
Some users have complained that Claude’s usage quotas run out quickly. OpenAI, which is preparing its own IPO, offers a competing model with more frequent usage resets and larger quotas, according to Decrypt.
Anthropic’s core business depends on infrastructure from companies including Google and Nvidia. Reuters reported that the filing raised questions about whether infrastructure partners can secure the financing needed to deliver the planned capacity.
The updated disclosures put Anthropic’s total lease and purchasing commitments at about $895.4 billion. The company says substantially all of that relates to compute and infrastructure.
Anthropic made its IPO filing public on October 26. It plans to list its Class A common stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol “ANT.”
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley lead a group of 24 underwriters. Both Anthropic and existing shareholders will sell shares, but the number of shares and the price range have not yet been set.
