Anthropic S-1 omits per-token economics and cloud splits

Anthropic's S-1, filed October 26 and amended Monday with third-quarter numbers, states that more than 40% of its revenue flows through the cloud marketplaces of Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, without naming how much comes from each. That omission anchors a column in Tech Policy Press by Ilan Strauss and Tim O'Reilly, co-directors of the AI Disclosures Project.

The authors argue Anthropic has also not filed its computing-power purchase contracts, despite "SEC rules requiring disclosure of contracts on which a business is substantially dependent." Beyond that, the filing publishes none of the token-level numbers an investor would need to compare Anthropic against any peer: token volumes processed, revenue per token, costs per token, or utilization of contracted compute capacity. Two of the analysts on our tracker had already circulated the column within hours of its posting.

Their fix leans on an older rulebook. "The SEC already requires oil and gas producers to report how much oil and gas they produce, the average price they receive for each, and the average cost of producing a barrel of oil or its equivalent in gas, all using common definitions," they write, and they contend "Frontier AI developers need the same, including a common definition of a token, so investors can compare revenue and costs per token across companies." A token, they explain, is "a small piece of text or other data processed by a model, and the unit in which most of Anthropic's usage-based sales are billed."

Governance limits the usual IPO remedy of letting shareholders press for disclosure after pricing. Once the offering closes, Anthropic's seven founders will hold 50.1% of votes on general shareholder matters, and the Long-Term Benefit Trust, an independent body of five trustees with no financial stake in the company, will select four of the seven directors.