Anthropic filed for its IPO on Monday, and I opened the S-1 planning to skim it for 20 minutes. Three hours later, still on it.

Then I saw that Anthropic makes over $6.6 million in revenue per employee. I ran the maths twice.

One person at Anthropic brings in about as much as 130 people at TCS, and I can't stop thinking about it.

Everyone's arguing over whether ANT is worth the $1.5 trillion price tag.

I read it as a receipt for how much work companies already hand to AI, and pulled out 8 things you should know. Let's get into it.

It's the document a company has to file before it can sell shares to the public.

Back in February, Anthropic was already worth more than TCS, Infosys, HCL Tech, Wipro and Tech Mahindra combined.

In all of 2023, Anthropic made $41 million. In the first half of 2026, it made $16.3 billion, about 400x that whole year.

Finance Twitter can't stop posting this one. It's called net revenue retention (NRR), a fancy way of asking if your old customers are spending more with you this year.

A company that spent ₹1 lakh on Claude a year ago is now spending about ₹9 lakh, and that's before counting any new customers.

Reality check: Most software companies throw a party when NRR crosses 120%. And this leaves out Claude Pro and Max subscribers, so no, your Pro subscription isn't the reason.

That's how many pay Anthropic over $100,000 a year. Around 250 of them pay over $10 million, over ₹85 crore each.

Nobody pays ₹85 crore a year to chat with a bot. The filing points to agentic products like Claude Code and Cowork, and says Cowork is catching on faster than Claude Code did.

Anthropic lost $80.7 billion in the first half of 2026, almost 5x its revenue for the period. So how does a company whose revenue grew 14x in a year post a loss that big?

Because $72.4 billion of it is an accounting charge. No money left the bank for it.

Anthropic raised money through IOUs that turn into shares later. Every time its valuation jumped, those IOUs got pricier on paper, and that gets booked as a loss.

Reality check: The business itself lost $693 million, and Anthropic is sitting on $131 billion in cash and short-term investments. Nvidia, Broadcom and Micron still rallied the same day.

Anthropic calls it "closing the loop," where each Claude model now helps build the next one.

My take: Putting that warning in a document designed to make you buy shares is wild.

The seven co-founders, through a company they own, hold one share carrying 50.1% of all votes. A safety trust holds another share that picks most of the board.

The founders have also pledged 80% of their shares to charity, though the filing says that pledge isn't legally binding. A promise with an asterisk, basically.

NASA engineers used Claude Code to plan two Perseverance rover drives, the first AI-planned drives on another planet.

Meanwhile, I still have to ask Claude three times to fix one Excel formula.

Nobody expects weak demand, so the real fight is over price. Cerebras jumped 68% on day one in May and was about 62% below that day's high by mid-October.

Reuters also counted about $518 billion in compute deals Anthropic mostly can't cancel, while many of its customers can cut spending whenever they want.

If you're in India: you can't get in at the IPO price. Once it lists, you can buy through apps like Vested or INDmoney under LRS (the RBI route for investing abroad).

None of this is investment advice.

Out of all 8, revenue per employee is the one I keep coming back to.

India built its IT industry on a simple formula where more people meant more billable hours and more revenue.

Anthropic is running that formula in reverse, and 11,900 companies are paying six figures a year for it.

Nifty IT already fell about 5.9% in a single day in February, days after Cowork's plug-ins launched.

I can't tell you whether ANT doubles or halves in its first month.

I can tell you who I'd bet on: the people who know which task to hand an agent and can catch it when it messes up. Owning the share is a bonus.

So before the roadshow kicks off, pick one task that eats an hour of your week and hand it to Cowork or Claude Code. Check what comes back the way you'd check an intern's work.

Then hit reply and tell me how it went, or which of the 8 got you.

Until next time,
Vaibhav 🤝

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