$100,000 per month per employee: Anthropic’s extravagant spending revealed ahead of its IPO

How will investors judge Anthropic’s finances? That is the question on Wall Street’s mind right now, as the company prepares to be listed on the stock market. Its finances are being scrutinized, and certain line items are of greater interest than others, particularly expenses related to salaries for Anthropic employees.$100,000 per month per employee: that’s the average jackpot at Anthropic.

Salaries, bonuses, payroll taxes and stock: employees are very expensive for Anthropic

All of these figures come from the Form S-1 filed with the SEC, the U.S. agency responsible for regulating financial markets. It is one of the many documents that will enable Anthropic to go public. In this form, we learn that between July and September 2026, Anthropic spent $1.711 billion on personnel expenses. Spread across the company’s roughly 5,300 employees, that works out to an average of approximately $107,610 per month per employee.

These expenses obviously include salaries (with compensation for the best engineers having soared, and not just at Anthropic), payroll and employer taxes, employee benefits, and expenses related to shares granted to employees. And it is the latter that accounts for the vast majority of personnel-related expenses. Of the $1.711 billion, approximately $1.070 billion is spent on stock alone. In reality, Anthropic does not actually spend this money, but hands a share of its ownership to its employees, which reduces the value held by existing shareholders. Nevertheless, it is still recorded as an expense.

Without this component of compensation, the monthly cost per employee is only about $40,300.This mechanism is entirely standard in American tech, but Anthropic has taken it to the extreme. It enables the company to recruit the best AI engineers and researchers and, above all, to retain them. These employees are therefore incentivized to stay until the value of their shares explodes; an event that can happen… at an IPO.

What will happen when Anthropic goes public?

Even with compensation packages this large, Anthropic is doing well: in the first nine months of 2026, the company generated no less than $33.24 billion in revenue. That is an increase of approximately 1,200% year over year. Staff-related expenses fell from 40% of revenue to around 15%. And that makes sense: once Claude has been developed, all that remains is to “simply” sell access to it (while improving it, of course). It is mainly spending on infrastructure and computing power that weighs on Anthropic’s bottom line. Over six months, Anthropic spent nearly $9 billion on this line item: nearly four times more than last year over the same period.

Yet this impressive growth is called into question by the company’s losses: $104.039 billion in the first nine months of 2026, compared with $25.107 billion a year earlier. The IPO is expected to take place in mid-November, with a valuation of between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion.

While some people think the AI bubble has burst, this IPO is kind of a test for the entire generative AI sector. If the IPO is successful, AI could still have a few years to prove itself. But if it flops, AI companies will have to clean up their finances to attract investors again. It is a matter of life or death: improving AI models always requires more computing power and, by extension, more money being pumped in.

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