Anthropic's amended IPO filing shows $1.7bn quarterly personnel cost

Anthropic's amended IPO filing makes its wage bill visible as it moves toward a listing. Some restricted stock units carry two conditions: a period of service and a liquidity event such as an IPO. The filing also shows what stock-based compensation would cost if the company had listed on 30 September 2026.

The stock award bill

Had Anthropic completed its IPO on 30 September 2026, it says it would have recorded an $8.2 billion stock-based compensation charge that day for restricted stock units. That charge would have exceeded the $4.86 billion in personnel expenses Anthropic reported for the first nine months of 2026. Anthropic expected to recognise another $24.1 billion in expense for those awards over a weighted-average period of about two years, according to its amended filing. Of the more than $1.7 billion personnel expense for July to September, $1.1 billion came from stock-based compensation. The rest covers salaries, bonuses, benefits and payroll taxes. Anthropic records the share value as an expense even though employees do not receive that amount in cash.

Payroll is a smaller slice than it was

In 2023, Anthropic spent more than twice as much on personnel as it brought in from customers. That share has fallen sharply.

By the first nine months of 2026, personnel costs reached $4.8 billion, or about 15% of the $33.2 billion in revenue Anthropic reported for the same period, TechSpot reported. Revenue reached $17 billion in the quarter to 30 September, up from $11.5 billion in the previous quarter, TechCrunch reported on 3 November. Compute took 58% of revenue in that quarter, up from 48% the quarter before, on a compute bill of $10 billion. That includes $5.0 billion of compute under short-term commitments, which the filing says currently costs significantly more than comparable compute bought under multi-year deals. TechCrunch reported that Anthropic's public deals include paying SpaceX $1.25 billion a month for compute, alongside multibillion-dollar deals with Nscale, Akamai and Volta. Compute margins worsened.

How the pay compares

Across 5,300 staff, the quarterly personnel expense works out at more than $322,000 per person, or about $107,300 per employee per month. Anthropic has grown its workforce fivefold since the end of 2024. It still has fewer than a tenth as many employees as Meta, which has around 67,000 people on its payroll.

Anthropic's gross profit margin was 85.4% in the first half of 2026, compared with 26.4% for Z.ai and 17.9% for MiniMax, according to Anthropic's S-1 and the two Hong Kong-listed companies' latest financial disclosures, SCMP reported.

What the filing says about costs

The amended filing says compute and infrastructure expenses will increase in absolute dollars and remain the largest operating expense for the foreseeable future. Anthropic is trying to lower those costs through a project it calls Anthropic Direct, but those efforts will not keep pace with demand, TechCrunch reported.

Anthropic has filed for what could be the biggest IPO ever, TechSpot reported.