Anthropic’s Gross Margin Is the Most Important Number in Tech

Anthropic will soon be the first frontier AI lab to disclose its audited gross margin. That one number that will set the terms for a $1.8 trillion debate. It won’t just price one IPO; it will recalibrate OpenAI’s eventual offering, public AI infrastructure multiples, and the entire hyperscale GPU buildout thesis, according to PitchBook’s analyst note.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI recently filed confidential S-1s following private rounds that valued Anthropic at $965 billion and OpenAI at $852 billion. Anthropic’s public prospectus is expected first, which means its gross margin disclosure will land before OpenAI prices.

PitchBook’s AI business quality framework scores Anthropic 8.2 out of 10.0, more than 1.7 times OpenAI’s 4.8, showing a yawning gap between the AI leaders. Anthropic’s annual recurring revenue, or ARR, rocketed from $1 billion in late 2024 to $47 billion by mid-2026, with more than 1,000 enterprise customers paying over $1 million annually and eight of the Fortune 10 running Claude in production. The business quality case is settled, but the pricing case remains.

Anthropic is on track for gross margins of roughly 44%, having spent $0.71 on computing power per dollar of revenue in the first quarter and a projected $0.56 in the second. If that number holds, it confirms half the case. The $965 billion mark prices a specific path: 40%-50% gross margins and $345 billion-$450 billion in 2030 revenue.

The prospectus can confirm the margin half. No prospectus can confirm the revenue half. If margins print below 35%, fair value compresses by 70% to 81%, and OpenAI, carrying a worse margin profile and a 20% revenue share owed to Microsoft, reprices harder.

Gross margin is the one number that no investor has seen and every underwriter needs. The analyst note maps four others—revenue composition, NRR survivability, GAAP profitability, and computing power dependency—and why each one feeds directly into whether $965 billion holds.