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Welcome back. We’re in the home stretch of 2026 — can you believe it?
This edition unpacks the winners and potential losers from Anthropic’s upcoming IPO.
Plus, decoding the Fed’s latest policy meeting with help from Morgan Stanley.
And for paid subscribers, a peek inside Macro Talk’s recent CFO dinner in Tribeca, sponsored by OneStream Software.
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The Rising Tide:
Anthropic
Photo: VCG/VCG via Getty Images
Each week in this section, I unpack a rising tide that will shape how the economy moves and how we work. There’s no shortage of macro currents to examine, but I’d be remiss not to focus this edition on Anthropic.
The AI giant filed its S-1 registration statement last Monday, kicking off the public phase of its IPO process and giving the world its first detailed look at the company's finances.
Rather than rehash the same summaries you’ve probably read in a dozen other places, let’s examine what the filing reveals about where Anthropic’s money and ambitions are headed — and which boats stand to rise and fall with its tide.
Who stands to gain
Big Tech and chipmakers: They’re positioned to benefit financially from Anthropic on multiple fronts — as suppliers, infrastructure partners, and investors — even if Anthropic itself struggles to turn a profit.
Anthropic could spend as much as $807 billion over the next decade on data centers, chips, and computing power with the likes of Broadcom, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, SpaceXAI, and Microsoft, the NYT estimates.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Broadcom, AMD, Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures also stand to benefit massively from their pre-IPO investments, as Reuters and CNBC detail.
Investors and insiders — aka The Tech Bubble: Paydays are coming, and returns will likely seed more tech growth.
Some 300 institutional investors have invested $130 billion into Anthropic, PitchBook data shows.
Then there are the Anthropic employees who could “become liquid at once,” Late Checkout CEO Greg Isenberg points out on X.
“So expect the biggest wave of new AI startups and angel checks San Francisco has ever seen,” he writes. “Reminds me when Facebook went public but this is way bigger.”
Worthy of note: pension plans, particularly those that invested in Anthropic backer Spark Capital, could also see a sizable windfall with the IPO.
Wall Street: The enormous cost of building AI infrastructure has generated new business for the financial industry.
Lenders including Apollo and Blackstone that are financing tens of billions of dollars of Anthropic’s chip leases stand to collect interest for years to come.
And the IPO itself will see more than 20 banks, led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, sharing in the fees.
OpenAI’s advertising business: Anthropic says it’s “committed to keeping Claude free of advertising,” even though ads “would likely be a large source of revenue,” leaving one less potential competitor for AI marketing budgets.
OpenAI’s early foray into advertising has been off to a “bumpy” start, WSJ reports.
Who should be on alert
Those whose bosses chase revenue per employee: RPE has become a favored scorecard among companies focused on efficiency.
Anthropic revealed in its filing that it generates more than $6.6 million in annual revenue per employee — roughly 21 times the national median.
And though Anthropic is hardly representative of the broader economy, that may not stop executives in entirely different industries from looking at its numbers and asking why their own employees aren't generating more revenue.
Those in biotech and pharma: Anthropic is building its own molecular biology lab and life sciences teams, and the totality of its recent efforts suggests it’s “positioning itself to participate more directly in scientific discovery rather than simply supplying technology to researchers,” Fierce Biotech notes.
That could put Anthropic in direct competition with some of the same pharmaceutical companies already using Claude in their R&D, as well as the scientists who work for them.
In its filing, Anthropic says Claude agents can operate lab equipment such as microscopes, liquid handlers and robotic arms.
If AI agents can increasingly perform physical laboratory tasks, even technicians could face automation pressures.
Screenshot: Anthropic S-1, page 7
Where investors should be cautious
Circular financing clouds the picture: Researchers with the Bank for International Settlements are warning about the risks of financial circularity among AI companies.
“When a supplier finances a customer, part of the supplier’s revenue growth reflects its own capital investment, rather than organic final demand. This makes it harder for investors, lenders and supervisors to gauge what part of the current AI boom is based on organic demand,” they write.
If all goes well, everyone benefits. If not, losses at one company could ripple through the entire system.
And because many of these deals are opaque and complex, it’s hard to monitor and assess overall risk.
But what’s perhaps most concerning is that these arrangements are not only spreading globally, but also attracting companies like Meta which haven’t been facing issues raising money.
CNBC has a great interactive graphic illustrating the circular money flow around Anthropic, which counts Amazon, Google, and Microsoft as both investors and vendors.
The biggest risk of all
Everyone on the planet: The S-1 is ultimately a sales document for investors. Even so, Anthropic acknowledges concerns about a Skynet-like scenario, as it always has:
“[S]ufficiently advanced AI systems could, if not developed, deployed, and operated with appropriate safeguards, oversight, and security measures, pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity,” Anthropic says in its filing.
To put that giant red flag in perspective with the IPO, here’s friend and journalist Sam Ro, editor of the investing newsletter TKer:
Many people are amplifying Anthropic's warning. … That's obviously a major societal concern. But as a stock market investor, I wouldn't view this risk alone as a reason to sell.
If we do experience an existential catastrophe, having money might not be your biggest concern. It seems smarter to keep money in the market because, if there's no catastrophe, you won't have lost money worrying about a low-probability risk.
If a catastrophe does hit, what you lose in the market will likely be low on your list of priorities. But just in case, keep some matches, a knife, and a portable water filter on hand.
Hope’s macro view
Anthropic is expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker “ANT” around mid-November. Once it goes public, we'll get quarterly disclosures that offer a clearer picture of one of the biggest players driving AI transformation.
With so much of the economy now tied to the AI boom — from chipmakers and banks to employers and workers — that kind of transparency can't come soon enough.
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Decoding:
Holding Rates Steady
After September’s hike, the Fed expectedly kept the target range for the policy rate unchanged at 3.75-4.0%, and it made no changes to its balance sheet policies, Morgan Stanley’s North America research team wrote in a note last week.
“Chairman Warsh pointed to tighter financial conditions and emphasized productivity-led growth, which to us suggest less need for aggressive tightening,” they observe.
But perhaps the most interesting comment the chair made last week was on the relationship between interest rates and the AI boom:
So there was a narrative for quite a while, maybe even in this room over the course of the last several press conferences, well, [the Fed is] going to raise rates or talking about raising rates, but it's not going to have any effect on AI because the returns that investors are expecting are so different.
I was skeptical of that view. Interest rates get in the cracks. Interest rates affect directly or indirectly almost everything. …
So, on the thrust of your question with respect to the new technology and this investment surge, do interest rates matter? I believe they do, and I don't believe that they're somehow divorced from the rest of the economy.
Translation: If you thought nothing could stop the AI train, the Fed chair just signaled it at least has brakes.
More from the Decoding series:
Macro Talk IRL:
CFOs Leading AI Transformation
Macro Talk held its third private CFO roundtable and dinner in partnership with OneStream Software last week. Here’s a photo and what I learned:
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