Big Short investor Eisman calls Anthropic IPO disclosures deliberate, prospectus stops at June while growth halves and compute eats 59 cents of every revenue dollar, nearly 400 billion in commitments stay off the front page

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Steve Eisman, the investor best known for shorting subprime mortgages before the 2008 collapse, says Anthropic is deliberately withholding its latest quarterly financials from investors ahead of a potentially $2 trillion IPO. The Big Short figure made the accusation on the Prof G Markets podcast, pointing to the company's October 26 prospectus, which contained financial statements only through June. Asked whether the omission was deliberate, Eisman answered: "Only very intentional."

The numbers explain the reticence. According to Reuters figures cited by Eisman, Anthropic's quarterly revenue growth decelerated from 144 percent in the second quarter to 45 percent in the third. The company produced $2.08 in revenue for every dollar spent on computing and infrastructure in the second quarter; by the third, that had fallen to $1.70, a decline of roughly 18 percent. Compute spending went from consuming about 48 cents of every revenue dollar to nearly 59 cents in three months.

Eisman attributes part of the slowdown to the fading of what he calls "tokenmaxing" — the period when corporate customers let employees consume AI computing resources without watching the bill. Finance departments have since started reading invoices, and Chinese models competing on price have put downward pressure across the board.

The commitments are the other half of the story. Eisman estimates Anthropic's potential future computing obligations could run between $800 billion and $900 billion depending on which agreements are counted. The filing identifies at least $110 billion in commitments involving Amazon, $114.5 billion associated with Google's infrastructure, and $161.2 billion in equipment lease payments involving Broadcom — nearly $386 billion across three arrangements, though the agreements span different periods and are not debt payable immediately.

The pattern is familiar to anyone who watched the last bubble build: the growth story sells the IPO, the cost structure arrives later. A company whose valuation rests on trust shipping a prospectus that stops short of its worst quarter is not a disclosure gap — it is a negotiation over what investors will accept without seeing.