AI
Anthropic's S-1 points to a Nasdaq debut worth up to $2 trillion
The frontier AI lab's IPO filing could value it at $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion, with analysts parsing what its numbers say about the wider AI economy.
Still
Crunchy.
YESTERDAY, STILL WORTH KNOWING
Anthropic files for a vast Nasdaq listing, Microsoft and Google post AI-heavy earnings, Reddit plans a logged-in future, and a study finds experts quietly deferring to AI agents.
Anthropic's trillion-dollar filing
Anthropic, a frontier AI lab, has filed its S-1, the US listing document for going public, with trading on the Nasdaq possibly starting next month at a reported valuation of $1.5 to $2 trillion. The filing offers the first detailed public look at how a frontier AI lab makes and spends money. Analyst Joey Brookhart of SemiAnalysis, whose firm built an outside model of the company's finances in July, said on the Decoder podcast that it shows a company scaling efficiently, with more than $70 billion of annualised recurring revenue and healthy margins and free cash flow. He suggested the numbers helped drive a rally in semiconductor and compute stocks.
The catch, in his view, is concentration: the two leading labs together sit at around $120 billion of annualised revenue, drawn largely from the top one percent of customers, some spending $50,000 to $100,000 per employee, with much of Anthropic's business tied to coding. Reaching the trillion-dollar revenue ambitions its leadership has floated would require broader white-collar adoption, where AI shifts from augmenting work to replacing labour in some areas. Enterprise budgeting cycles have not yet meaningfully included these labs, and competition is thickening.
Big Tech earnings, told through AI
Microsoft reported $92.3 billion in revenue for the first quarter of its 2027 financial year, beating expectations, with net income of $36.6 billion. It has overhauled its reporting into two segments, making Azure's $33.17 billion revenue, up 48 percent year over year, a quarterly headline number. CFO Amy Hood described Microsoft Cloud growth of 30 percent as accelerating. The consumer side was weaker: Windows OEM and devices revenue fell 22 percent, and Hood expects a further mid-30s percent decline next quarter. The results came days after Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to around 60,000 employees, roughly a quarter of its workforce, as it spends heavily on AI.
Google will expand ads in its AI Mode search experience internationally as search revenue growth slowed to 12 percent year over year and Alphabet's net profit fell 25 percent. Chief business officer Philipp Schindler acknowledged that strong growth in AI Mode queries had an impact on search revenue because of their lower monetisation. Google Cloud revenue rose 103 percent to $30.7 billion, helped significantly by sales of its in-house TPU AI chips, while capital expenditure hit $51.4 billion, more than double a year earlier.
Adapting to an AI-shaped internet
Reddit plans a shift to a primarily logged-in experience, testing outside the US in the fourth quarter, as search referrals fell by more than 1 million users weekly in October, which it attributes to AI-powered search results. CEO Steve Huffman told investors that Google's AI features have 'really shifted in their relationship with the rest of the internet.' Revenue rose 53 percent to $895 million, but US daily users declined, and Reddit warned daily active users could fall by a low-double-digit percentage by next quarter if the search decline continues.
An Anthropic study found that experts adopted an AI agent's randomly assigned preferences in 86 percent of analytical decisions, often without realising it. The agent could not lie, only argue honestly, and participants finished faster with fewer errors, though researchers caution the comparison group was smaller and less experienced.