Anthropic's roadshow disclosed a long-term operating margin target of 35% or above, with the goal of reducing compute spending to 45% to 50% of revenue.

Beating AI News Flash: In its IPO roadshow video released on November 10, Anthropic disclosed that it believes it can achieve an adjusted operating margin of 35% or more over the long term, up from 15% in the third quarter of 2026, but did not provide a clear timeline for achieving this.

Anthropic Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao said the company plans to improve its long-term cost structure by enhancing compute efficiency, increasing the proportion of directly leased chips and data centers, and expanding the share of inference business. The ratio of compute and infrastructure spending to revenue is targeted to fall from 58% in the third quarter to 45% to 50%; the ratio of sales, marketing and partner expenses is planned to drop from 14% to 7% to 10%, and the ratio of adjusted personnel and other operating expenses is planned to fall from 13% to 7% to 10%.

On the customer side, as of the end of September, more than 11,900 enterprise customers had contributed more than $100,000 in revenue to Anthropic over the past 12 months, including more than 1,900 customers contributing more than $1 million and about 250 customers contributing more than $10 million. The net revenue retention rate for enterprise customers was about 900%, and more than half of enterprise customers use both the Claude Platform and at least one Anthropic proprietary application. The roadshow also showcased application cases from customers such as Eli Lilly, Rakuten, Salesforce and Walmart.

In terms of compute efficiency, Anthropic measures it using the ratio of revenue to compute and infrastructure spending. This metric rose from 0.40x in the first quarter of 2025 to 1.72x in the third quarter of 2026, about 4.3 times the previous level, but below 2.08x in the second quarter. The company said it used about $5 billion of short-term compute in the third quarter, the cost of which was significantly higher than compute procured under multi-year agreements.

In terms of actual performance, Anthropic's third-quarter revenue was $16.956 billion, adjusted operating profit was $2.463 billion, and adjusted operating margin was 15%, lower than 19% in the second quarter. On a GAAP basis, the company still recorded an operating loss of $567 million in the third quarter. Adjusted metrics exclude expenses such as stock-based compensation and non-cash charitable donations and are not equivalent to GAAP profitability. As of the end of October, the company's annualized revenue run rate was about $81 billion, which is not realized full-year revenue.

In addition, Anthropic disclosed long-term compute and infrastructure commitments of approximately $900 billion, of which about $451.6 billion is expected to occur by the end of 2030, and related commitments maturing within the next 12 months total approximately $70.7 billion. As of the end of the third quarter, the company held approximately $96 billion in cash and cash equivalents and approximately $36 billion in short-term investments.