Analysts at Yorkville Ives have flagged a series of "concerning (not unexpected)" risk factors in Anthropic's IPO filing, led by its dependence on cloud partners for computing power.
Demand has historically exceeded available capacity, and Anthropic has asked its cloud partners for more compute than they were willing to provide.
Those partners also build competing models, and could curtail, reprice or terminate access, the note says.
Take-or-pay commitments, which are owed whether or not the capacity is used, have been partly debt-funded.
Dan Ives puts them at roughly $270bn, made up of at least $110.0bn to Amazon, $114.5bn to Google and $44.9bn to Microsoft, running into the 2030s.
There are also $161.2bn of Broadcom chip lease payments, up to $120.5bn with SpaceX.AI, cancellable on 90 days' notice from early 2027, and roughly $86bn with Nscale and Lambda.
The filing discloses past failed or underperforming training runs, and warns that the rate of improvement from scaling models may plateau.
It also says safety-driven release delays, such as holding back Mythos through Project Glasswing, could slow capability gains against rivals.
On liability, it cites misuse by bad actors and models acting autonomously in ways no user directed, with contractual protections and insurance possibly proving insufficient.
Class A shareholders may be unable to influence control, because the Long-Term Benefit Trust and the founders' voting vehicle hold voting power not tied to economic interest.
The company also says its public benefit mandate may conflict with financial returns.
Broadening base
Ives nonetheless called the growth "eye popping" and said the customer base is widening fast.
Customers with $100,000 or more of trailing 12-month revenue rose from more than 950 to more than 11,900 in a year, including every Fortune 10 company.
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Net revenue retention, which measures spending growth among existing customers, is about 900%.
No single customer exceeded 10% of revenue in the nine months to 30 September, and 79% of third-quarter revenue came from outside the top five, up from 64% in the first quarter.
Compute costs fell from 251% of revenue to 48% over six quarters, and adjusted operating income was $1.6bn, a 10% margin.
Ives called that margin the proof point, but said the commitments must be absorbed over seven to ten years whether or not demand holds.
That makes the pace at which growth slows the key input, he said.
Check before filing: the note says no customer exceeded 10% of revenue over nine months, while earlier reports put about 20% of first-half revenue with two customers. Those could be consistent, but check the filing's wording before running both.
