Why Anthropic's 85% Margin Is a Reality Check for Skeptics

When Anthropic on Monday dropped its long-awaited initial public offering prospectus filing, a lot of the details—see our top takeaways here —weren’t exactly new, given how much my colleagues and others had previously reported about it. Two items stood out to me, though: how Anthropic is running its models more efficiently than before, and changes it made to its already-unusual governance structure. Anthropic’s ability to generate $3.5 billion in free cash flow in the first half of 2026, from $16.3 billion in revenue, shows just how much it has improved the way it runs AI in the cloud, compared to the same period a year earlier, when it burned $1.6 billion.

First reported by The Information. This page is a short excerpt; the full text is theirs.