Anthropic is preparing to list on Nasdaq at a valuation that could reach $2 trillion or higher, and it started by not filing in public. The prospectus was expected last week; instead the company passed the documents to a small group of investors first. The number travelling with them, reported by the Financial Times, is a gross margin above 80% — measured before Anthropic pays partners including Amazon their share of revenue, and before the cost of training the models.
Those two exclusions are not footnotes. The revenue share is money Anthropic has already promised away to its partners. Training is what it spends to have a product at all. A margin struck before both describes the cost of serving tokens, not the economics of the company. It is a real figure, and I would argue it is a useful one — serving is where the recurring gross profit has to come from — but it is not the figure a public-market buyer would be underwriting.
Sitting behind it is the card Anthropic is actually playing with investors: a second profitable quarter.
What that profitability is meant to support is a growth curve. Joey Brookhart, an analyst at SemiAnalysis, says investors expect Anthropic to reach $120 billion in annual revenue by the end of this year, and nearly triple that by the end of 2027 — somewhere around $350 billion. Set the $2 trillion valuation against those two numbers and the arithmetic is roughly seventeen times the revenue expected this year, and under six times the 2027 expectation. The price is not being set on the company as it stands. It is being set on the second number.
The order of operations on the prospectus is worth dwelling on. A company that was due to file publicly and instead circulated documents to a selected group is choosing its readers. The generous interpretation is that Anthropic is sounding out anchor demand before disclosure becomes permanent and quotable. The less generous one is that the numbers read better to an audience briefed in the room than to one reading a filing cold. Either way, the people who saw the 80% figure first saw it with someone available to explain what it excludes.
In the same stretch, Dario Amodei publicly called for slowing the development of AI. Sam Altman and Elon Musk backed the call. Altman also told Fortune that OpenAI will not go public this year.
The split screen is the story. Amodei is asking the industry to decelerate while his company asks public markets to finance a near-tripling of revenue inside two years. Both positions can be held in good faith — you can want the frontier to advance more carefully and still want to sell what you have already built — but a prospectus is a commitment to a growth rate, and a growth rate like that does not look like deceleration from outside the building. Nothing released so far reconciles the two, and nobody circulating the documents appears to have been asked to.
There is a second consequence buried in Altman's remark. If Anthropic's listing lands and OpenAI stays private through the year, Anthropic becomes the first of the two to operate under quarterly disclosure — the first to have its compute commitments, its partner payments and its training spend read by people with no stake in the mission. That is a meaningful asymmetry between two companies that currently compete on roughly symmetrical terms of secrecy.
Which is where the 80% figure stops being a talking point. Before Amazon's cut and before training, it is a number Anthropic can choose to present. After a listing, the costs it excludes arrive on a schedule, audited, every ninety days, and the gap between the margin in the pitch and the margin in the filing becomes the thing the stock trades on.