Anthropic’s IPO and Our Collective Leap Of Faith

When Anthropic’s pre-IPO numbers leaked this week, its vast losses and unbreakable commitments were both remarkable and scary. The company’s revenue is growing impressively, jumping from $400 million in 2024 to $4.6 billion in 2025. But it spent $7.3 billion on infrastructure alone last year and expects to spend $518 billion on it over the next decade. Of that $518 billion, approximately 80% is non-cancellable.

As AI models have grown more capable, Anthropic has been a main beneficiary, but as the economy depends increasingly on AI to succeed, it’s effectively taking us all on a leap of faith that it will grow enough to fulfill its promises. To pull it off, the company will need to keep surging amid stiffening competition, increased political risk, and tightening wallets. And any hiccup could have widespread consequences.

Today’s public markets (and much of the economy) depend on AI’s continued growth. The S&P 500 is currently experiencing its worst breadth since the dot-com bubble, according to Goldman Sachs, with the median stock trading 16% below its 52-week high even as the index is up around 13% this year. AI has been holding it up. Nvidia alone added more than $1 trillion in market cap in 2026, and half of the S&P 500’s earnings-per-share growth is coming from AI investment, per Goldman. Put simply: without the AI story, we’d likely be looking at a contracting market.

Anthropic and OpenAI are central to the story. Without their spending, the projections underpinning the stock market’s giants would look much weaker. Anthropic’s infrastructure spending commitments, for instance, include $111.1 billion to Alphabet, $110 billion to Amazon, and $31.4 billion to Microsoft, per Reuters. Anthropic has agreed to spend this money “regardless of usage.”

To keep the built-in assumptions making the markets work, both AI labs will have to deliver historic growth on an unprecedented scale. But as they approach the public markets, the risks are rising.

For the frontier labs, the most pressing issue is that non-frontier models are getting good enough to deliver solid product experiences. Meta’s Muse, for instance, is a good product despite being built on models inferior to OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s. If frontier models aren’t needed to build good products, then it will be harder to justify spending a premium for them.

The AI frontier’s dwindling advantage is coinciding with a movement among businesses to rein in AI spending. Businesses this year saw AI spending spin out of control with uncertain ROI, and now they’re cutting costs, or at least spending more efficiently. One way they’re doing this is directing token spend to capable standard models. “We don’t need to always use the best, best model from an outcome perspective,” SAP CEO Christian Klein told me this week on Big Technology Podcast.

And despite its magical capabilities, AI polls poorly among the general public and has become a juicy target for politicians. Even as President Trump gathered the country’s AI CEOs for a feel-good moment at the White House this week, local and regional politicians continued to campaign against the datacenters the industry needs to keep expanding. “Superintelligence factories = surveillance centers,” tweeted Republican governor Ron DeSantis shortly after the CEOs walked out of their meeting with Trump.

Anthropic, to be sure, has a real shot at living up to its promises. It’s developing a wildly powerful technology that many seem to have an endless desire to use. It’s expected to reach $100 billion in annualized revenue this year and now has products like Claude Code and Claude Cowork that mitigate its dependence on selling its models to others. And it’s kept improving its technology despite the warnings that it could hit a wall.

But should the company’s momentum start to wobble, it will be left with a host of massive financial obligations it could struggle to meet. And that won’t just be a problem for Anthropic, but everyone else. So here goes the leap of faith.

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