Anthropic’s ad bill is soaring, according to IPO filing
By Krystal Scanlon • October 27, 2026
Ivy Liu
Claude will not show ads when Anthropic becomes a publicly traded company. But many ads will promote Claude.
Documents that the AI company filed with U.S. regulators before its stock market listing show that its advertising spending rose from $33 million in 2024 to $147 million in 2025. That was more than Duolingo, an app known for its marketing, spent on sales and marketing combined in 2025: $125.7 million. Anthropic's spending continued to rise in 2026. In the first six months of the year, its marketing and advertising costs were $273 million higher than in the same period a year earlier.
Even so, advertising is still a small part of Anthropic's total costs. Sales, marketing and partnership costs reached $3.17 billion in the first half of 2026. Most of that increase came from payments to cloud companies that resell Claude. These payments accounted for $2.7 billion of the increase.
This is a big change from 2023, when Anthropic's advertising spending was so small that its filing called it “not material.” Claude first became available for commercial sale in the first quarter of that year, and Anthropic earned $41 million in revenue during all of 2023. Since then, the company has had many more products to sell, especially since the start of 2025. Claude Code, a tool that can carry out coding tasks, launched in February 2025. Anthropic released several new models over the rest of the year, ending with Opus 4.5 in November. Claude Cowork, which uses the Claude Code approach for everyday office tasks, arrived in January 2026.
With more products to launch, Anthropic had more things to advertise, and its advertising budget grew. The filing says the increase in advertising spending in 2025 came from “higher media and public relations spend to support product launches.” It gives the same reason for higher spending in 2026, but does not mention public relations this time. Sales and marketing costs rose in every quarter covered by the filing, with the biggest increases in the first half of 2026.
The spending appears to have helped. The filing names Opus 4.5 as one reason quarterly revenue growth rose from 48% in the final three months of 2025 to 132% in the first three months of 2026. Anthropic earned $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026, compared with $1.2 billion in the same period of 2025.
Why the spending keeps growing
Anthropic earns money when people use Claude. Most of its revenue comes from customers who pay based on how much they use the service and which model they use. This works much like an electricity bill: the more you use, the more you pay. A business that adds Claude to its own app pays for the use that app generates, so a busy month means a larger bill. These usage fees brought in $13.1 billion of Anthropic's $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026. The rest came from subscriptions, where customers pay a fixed amount for a set level of use. The filing says usage fees will remain “the substantial majority of total revenue for the foreseeable future.”
This means Anthropic's growth depends on getting people to use Claude more often and for more tasks. Every extra coding job completed through an account that charges by use adds to the bill. Subscribers who reach their usage limits can move to a more expensive plan or pay for more use. Because so much of Anthropic's business depends on usage, its advertising budget is unlikely to shrink soon.
The filing says this directly: “The promotion of our brand requires us to make substantial expenditures, which we anticipate will increase as our market becomes more competitive.” Anthropic also says it worries that it “may fall behind competitors with more established or widely recognized brands.”
This concern has been part of the AI race throughout the year. The different models are similar enough in what they can do that people's opinions of the companies behind them matter a lot. Anthropic also knows it cannot fully control how people see it. The filing warns that the company could be “grouped with other industry participants and judged similarly, regardless of differences in our approach or conduct.” It also warns that people might think its products “contribute to job displacement or economic description could generate significantly negative media coverage.”
“This document makes it exceptionally clear that they consider their brand one of their greatest assets,” said Nate Elliott, eMarketer's principal analyst for AI in marketing and commerce. “They use the word ‘brand’ more than 50 times just in the risks section. (Although, to be fair, that section is almost 100 pages long. It turns out AI vendors carry lots of risk.)”
Throughout 2026, Anthropic has tried to show that it is a different kind of AI company, but taking this position has come at a cost. In February, it said publicly that its technology should not be used for mass surveillance of people inside the United States or for fully autonomous weapons. President Trump responded by ordering federal agencies to stop using Claude. The Department of War also called Anthropic a “supply-chain risk to national security.” Anthropic sued. In August, a federal court in California mostly ruled in Anthropic's favor. But a month later, an appeals court in Washington upheld the decision to label the company a supply-chain risk in a 2-1 ruling. Anthropic has since asked the full appeals court to review the decision.
Two months after the dispute with the Pentagon began, Anthropic held back its most powerful model. In April, it released Mythos only as a limited preview for a small group of organizations working in cybersecurity. The company said it did this because of the model's “advanced capabilities in cyber vulnerability discovery.”
Keeping ads out of Claude is part of Anthropic's effort to present itself as different from other AI companies. The filing lists “monetization strategies that differ from those of certain competitors” as one way the company stands apart. It does not name the competitor, but it does not need to. OpenAI began running ads in ChatGPT in February 2026. Anthropic also used part of its Super Bowl advertising this year to tell viewers that Claude would remain free of ads. Anthropic argues that selling services to businesses is a better way to make money. It says business customers bring in “higher monetization than consumer AI.”
“And that makes sense in an industry with so much market share left to claim,” Elliott said. “Most U.S. internet users still don't use AI chatbots in any given month; even for most of those who do use AI the cost of switching from one chatbot to another isn't as high as, say, abandoning your email address. Under current market conditions, they're right to consider maintaining a positive brand image paramount.”
In other words, Anthropic's advertising spending has two goals. One is to introduce Claude to more people. The other is to make sure people think of Anthropic's name, rather than the AI industry's overall reputation, when they think about the company.
Anthropic did not respond to Digiday's request for comment.