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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. Specifically, Anthropic said it is generating an 85% gross profit margin from powering existing models, which doesn’t include the cost of developing new models. (If that figure rings a bell, it’s the same gross margin estimate my colleague Ann described in this column about Anthropic’s data center grab, which elicited sharp questions from some AI skeptics at the time.) Anthropic is doing so even as it relies almost entirely on computing it rents from cloud providers, which themselves need to generate a profit. So its IPO filing is a reality check on the AI skeptics’ longtime view that a business model founded on selling models on a pay-as-you-go, consumption basis wouldn’t be profitable.
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