Benedict Evans
Independent technology analyst based in London, covering mobile, media and AI for over two decades.
“Anthropic's R&D is 59.5% of revenue in H1. Google was 9.5%, Meta 10.5%. So add the two together, 75% of revenue is going on running the existing model and building the next model. And 80% of Q3 revenue came from models built in the last six months. So people compare this to a mining company: running a gold mine is really profitable, but you've got to dig another one, and for Anthropic the gold mine only lasts six or eight months.”
Another Podcast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026
Context
Evans compares Anthropic's S-1 cost structure with Google and Meta at their IPOs. The cost of serving customers looks similar; the cost of building the next model is far higher. It matters because the frontier moves so fast that each model goes stale within months.
Transcript
And Anthropic 85. So I mean, these are all, you know, with the, you know, close enough for government work. These are all good, close. It's all kind of the same number within French.
Yep.
Yeah, so they're spending sort of 15 to 20%. All of those companies are spending 15 to 20% of their revenue on actually serving the existing business. Then you look at the RD, which is the cost for Anthropic is the cost of building the next model. And at Google, RD was 9.5%. Meta is 10.5%. Anthropic is 60.5%. Sorry, 59.5% in H1. So plus the two of those together, 75% of revenue is going on running the existing model and building the next model. And then they say that 80% of Q3 revenue came from models built in the last six months. So this is why you've had people comparing this to a mining company or a pharma company in that actually running a gold mine is really, really profitable, but you've got to dig another one and that's really expensive. And for Anthropic, the gold mine only lasts for six months or eight months or a year or something, and then it becomes irrelevant because the pace of the frontier is going forward so much. You've got to have the newest model. So then you get questions which are, how does the ratio of that change? Because in second half of last year, Anthropic spent $4.5 billion on training. And in the first half of this year, they spent $9.7 billion of training. So they not exactly…
And is it fair to say that a big part of this IPO also is about bringing money? We've talked about this previously, but bringing money that's outside of the loop, because right now the money seems to be going in the circle of the, you know, the company's Anthropic rents its computers from also the…
So then there's a whole, so there's a whole second conversation, which is the amount of long-term commitments that Anthropic has made to purchase capacity in the future, which is hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars, depending on how you add it. It's something over a trillion dollars…
Okay.
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