Anthropic's S-1 Leaks Again: $80 Billion Loss, $2 Trillion IPO Target

Anthropic will seek a $2 trillion IPO valuation while carrying an $80 billion first-half net loss, according to a draft S-1 obtained by The Wall Street Journal. The leak, the second for the AI company's filing, lays out an income statement that reads like two different companies at once.

What do the leaked numbers show?

Revenue hit $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, up from $1.1 billion in the year-earlier period — a nearly fifteenfold jump. Full-year 2025 revenue came in at $4.6 billion. That's the good half of the ledger.

The expense side is where the valuation case gets stress-tested:

• $9 billion spent on computing capacity and infrastructure in H1 2026, up from $2.3 billion a year earlier
• $750 billion planned for compute over the coming years
• $450 billion already committed in mostly "noncancellable" deals with cloud providers
• $80 billion net loss in H1 2026, up from $13 billion the year prior

The filing also flags risk factors that go beyond the usual. Anthropic discloses a limited customer base and warns its product has the ability to hack into other companies — or, remarkably, "blackmail" its own customers.

Executive pay runs high but not extreme at the base level. CEO Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela, the company's president, each drew a $655,000 base salary in 2025. Most of their compensation sits in stock: his total package is valued at $18 million, hers at $16.5 million.

The takeaway: Anthropic is scaling revenue faster than almost any company in history, and still losing $80 billion in six months doing it.

Is Musk really merging Tesla and SpaceX?

Elon Musk said Tuesday that independent directors at Tesla and SpaceX have formed special committees to explore combining the two companies. At current market values, a merger would create a roughly $3.5 trillion giant.

Musk said he can't take part in the talks because he is a "conflicted party." And he's not calling it done.

"This is definitely the kind of question where I feel like I'm tap dancing through a minefield," Musk said on SpaceX's third-quarter earnings call. He added that calling a merger a certainty would be "overstating it."

The takeaway: special committees exist, which means the $3.5 trillion idea has cleared the first procedural hurdle — but Musk himself is treating it as a maybe.

Can CoreWeave actually pay its debts?

CoreWeave's stock has been a disaster recently. Corporate credit investors began selling its debt, pushing yields on those loans as high as 15% — the level you'd expect from a distressed company in the private credit markets.

Daniel Wang and Stefan Slowinski at BNP Paribas think the debt traders are wrong. In a paper titled "A Deep Dive into the Debt Machine," they argue CoreWeave's "active" contracts can generate $6-7 billion in cash flow to service debt and provide "meaningful coverage" of its $1.7 billion in annual interest payments.

"That is a potential path towards repaying ~$26 billion of [the company's] obligations, even if growth capex comes to a halt," the pair noted.

Two-thirds of CoreWeave's $130 billion in remaining performance obligations — the pipeline of work customers have contracted for — is already financed. The remaining $30 billion shortfall should be coverable by debt markets as long as they "remain open" to the company.

Their bottom line: "We see greater risk of a prolonged confidence crisis than an outright credit crisis."

The takeaway: this is a sentiment problem, not a solvency problem — on paper, at least.

Why is oil still expensive?

Supplies from the Middle East are back at roughly pre-war highs, even though Iran still heavily restricts travel through the Strait of Hormuz. Operators are simply using a wider variety of routes out of the region.

So why hasn't the price come down? Ukraine's bombardment of Russian oil and diesel refineries has taken out a huge chunk of global supply. "Combined net exports from the country and the Middle East [fell] by 1.3 million barrels per day in September, down more than 60% year on year," according to Alpine Macro's Kelly Xu.

The takeaway: the bottleneck moved from Hormuz to Russia's refineries, and Brent crude sits at $110 a barrel because of it.

Where are markets this morning?

Tech futures rose in premarket trading after SpaceX's Q3 earnings solidly beat analysts' expectations. SpaceX jumped 8.86% post-market, Tesla rose 1.42%, and Nasdaq futures gained 0.43%.

• S&P 500 futures: up 0.24%; the index rose 0.28% yesterday
• Europe: Stoxx 600 up 0.54%; the U.K.'s FTSE 100 up 0.03%
• Asia: South Korea's KOSPI up 3.29%; Japan's Nikkei 225 up 0.85%; India's Nifty 50 down 0.66%; China's CSI 300 down 0.97%
• Brent crude: $110 per barrel
• Bitcoin: $83,346

The takeaway: Musk's earnings beat and merger chatter are doing the heavy lifting for tech futures this morning.

Number of the day: 91.7%

Morgan Stanley estimates 91.7% of Nvidia's 2027 revenues are exposed to capex spending in the AI industry — the most exposed of all tech companies generating sales from AI customers. If the AI capex cycle wobbles, Nvidia wobbles hardest.

One more thing: strangers fill empty wedding seats

Jeff and Karina Besen of San Diego built Not a Wedding Crasher after their own date-night rut. "One day, Jeff literally looked at me and said, 'Hey, wouldn't it be fun if we could get dressed up and go to a wedding?'" Karina told Fortune.

The platform lets couples share unused seats with verified guests, who pay up to $150 to attend. The math checks out: an estimated 10% to 20% of invited guests RSVP no or drop out, and the average cost per wedding guest is $292. "You may have to pay for 100 seats, and you can only get 75 people," Jeff said.

Elsewhere on the radar: Ken Griffin says AI is "almost certainly" in a bubble, political campaigns have poured $137 million into AI-made ads ahead of the midterms after spending virtually nothing last cycle, and a French supermarket giant's shares plunged 14% after warning that "unprecedented" unrest will hit business.

The thread connecting the morning: AI economics — trillion-dollar valuations, $750 billion compute plans, a 91.7% revenue exposure figure — are now the single biggest variable in everything from IPO pipelines to debt markets.