Ed Zitron on Anthropic's IPO (S-1), AI Debt, and Counterparty Risk
October 1, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readAnthropic's IPO Filing Reveals a Business Running on Borrowed Time
Ed Zitron, who previously broke OpenAI's financials, got his hands on Anthropic's confidential S-1 filing for their planned IPO. His reaction was immediate: "I had a good chuckle." The numbers are brutal. In 2025, Anthropic spent $2.75 to make every single dollar of revenue—worse than OpenAI's $2.60. The company lost $8 billion on $4.6 billion in revenue.
But the headline loss is only the beginning. What makes Anthropic genuinely alarming, Zitron argues, is the structure beneath those numbers.
The Revenue That Isn't Really Theirs
Nearly half of Anthropic's revenue—47%—comes from Google and Amazon reselling Anthropic's models to their own cloud customers. This is not a normal concentration risk. These two companies are also Anthropic's direct competitors, each running their own rival AI models. Google has Gemini. Amazon has its own model investments. Both also provide Anthropic with compute infrastructure.
"Anthropic's success is contingent on Google and Amazon's ability to sell their stuff," Zitron says. This creates an arrangement where Anthropic's largest customers can discount Anthropic's tokens whenever they want—or simply stop pushing them. The company has no real control over its own revenue stream.
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What you'll learn
- 1 Timestamped Outline
- 2 (00:41) **Anthropic's S-1 Numbers Are Worse Than OpenAI's** - Ed Zitron reveals that Anthropic burned $2.75 for every dollar earned in 2025, worse than OpenAI's $2.60, and explains why the "safer" Anthropic narrative is backward.
- 3 (02:54) **Counterparty Risk: Amazon and Google Control Anthropic's Fate** - The revenue concentration through cloud resellers creates a fragile dependency that most investors underestimate.
- 4 (04:53) **The "2026 Will Be Better" Argument Is Unconvincing** - Ed dismisses booster claims that Anthropic's 2026 numbers will magically fix everything, given the scale of losses.
- 5 (06:45) **The S-1's AI Doom Warnings Are a Liability, Not a Feature** - Ed argues that Anthropic's risk-factor warnings about AI destroying humanity are bizarre for an IPO prospectus and make the company look unserious.
- 6 (10:10) **$518 Billion in Non-Cancelable Compute Obligations** - Anthropic has locked itself into staggering fixed costs that make profitability almost irrelevant.
- 7 (12:23) **Broadcom's Risky Financing Exposes Counterparty Risk at Scale** - The $35 billion private credit package between Broadcom, Apollo, and Blackstone creates a cascade of liability.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
This episode is brought to you by Sarmaya Partners. Learn more about Sarmaya’s LENS ETF, their full data and comparison, including performance here:
Ed Zitron, author of the Where's Your Ed At newsletter and host of the Better Offline podcast, returns to Monetary Matters to break down Anthropic's leaked IPO prospectus, as reported by Reuters. Ed argues that in 2025 Anthropic spent $2.75 for every dollar of revenue, worse than OpenAI's $2.60, and that nearly half its sales ran through Google and Amazon, two companies that also compete with it. We discuss Anthropic's $518 billion in compute commitments, why AI "run rate" figures can be misleading, and what the reported surge in 2026 revenue does and doesn't tell us. Ed also gives his take on Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots, and on whether AI agents can win over consumers. Then we turn to the credit markets: CoreWeave's borrowing costs, Oracle's ratings risk, data center SPVs trading below par, and how much of this debt sits with private credit lenders. Ed closes with his predictions for the Anthropic IPO and what he expects the AI build-out to look like by this time next year. Recorded afternoon of September 30, 2026.
Ed Zitron on X https://x.com/edzitron
Jack Farley on X https://x.com/JackFarley96
Pieces Discussed:
“Dead Money” (Sep 29, 2026): https://www.wheresyoured.at/dead-money/
“Premium: The Hater's Guide To AI Debt (Part 2)” (Sep 25, 2026): https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-the-haters-guide-to-ai-debt-part-2/
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