Anthropic's Employees Picked the Worst Quarter to Be Generous

Anthropic's Employees Picked the Worst Quarter to Be Generous

In Q2, Anthropic made an operating profit. In Q3 it booked a loss, because its staff gave to charity and the company matched them with new shares, 3 for 1 for early employees.

Published November 2026. All numbers come from Anthropic's IPO filing (the S-1 of 26 October and its amendment of 2 November) unless marked otherwise. The 2026 figures are unaudited.

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In Q2 2026, Anthropic made a $974 million operating profit.

In Q3, revenue grew almost 47%, to $17 billion.

And the operating result flipped to a $567 million loss.

Chips got more expensive. But revenue grew faster than chips did.

What tipped the quarter into a loss was something else.

It was charity.

In August, Anthropic's employees made a wave of donations. Anthropic matched them with new shares of its own. That match cost $1.96 billion.

Take it out, and Q3 is a $1.39 billion operating profit.

I've written three posts about this IPO: the six numbers to watch, the $80.7 billion loss and what Claude's work inside Anthropic is worth. So I looked at how a charity program can cost more than a whole quarter's profit.

Quick disclosure: I pay for Claude every month and use it every day.

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The 3-for-1 Match

Lots of companies match their employees' donations. At Microsoft it's a dollar for a dollar, up to $15,000 a year.

Anthropic's version is different in three ways.

It matches in shares. An employee donates some of their Anthropic stock (or cash from selling it) to a charity or a donor-advised fund. Anthropic then adds new shares of its own. It can pay in cash instead, but both times this year it paid in shares.

Early staff get 3 for 1. Anyone whose offer letter came before 17 May 2024 gets three company shares for every share they give. Later hires get one for one.

The cap is a share of your equity, not a dollar amount. Early staff can pledge up to 50% of their stock grants as they vest. Later hires, up to 25%.

Anthropic says about half of its employees take part.

At a company whose private share price rose about 20 times since early 2024, that adds up fast.

The seven co-founders can't use the match. They've pledged 80% of their own Anthropic equity to charity separately.

So who decides where the money goes?

The employee directs their own gift. Anthropic's plan administrator approves and picks the recipient for the company's match. The filing doesn't name who received this year's gifts.

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A Promise Paid in Shares

Picture promising a friend three bottles of wine for every bottle they give away.

If the price of wine triples, your promise costs three times as much.

That's what happened to Anthropic.

• In February, it paid last year's match with about 31 million shares. The bill: $667 million.
• In October, it paid August's match with 28 million shares. The bill: about $1.96 billion.

Fewer shares. About three times the bill.

One matching share cost Anthropic about $22 in February and about $70 by September.

No money left the company. Anthropic still brought in about $2.6 billion of cash from running the business in Q3.

So who pays?

Think of the company as a pizza. Every matching share is a new slice cut from the same pizza, so everyone else's slice gets a little thinner.

The other shareholders pay for the match. (A cash match wouldn't thin anyone's slice, but so far Anthropic has paid in shares.)

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Who Sold at $25.91

By the end of September, Anthropic valued each matching share at about $70.

Five months earlier, a lot of its employees had sold for far less.

In April, Anthropic let a group of outside buyers purchase shares from current and former employees, contractors and donor-advised funds. The price was $25.91 a share.

• 179.9 million shares changed hands.
• Sellers got $4.66 billion in cash.
• Dario and Daniela Amodei sold some too.

That was the same price investors paid in Anthropic's January–February funding round. The filing calls it "fair value".

Then the price moved.

In May and June, the next round priced at $58.90 a share. By September, the matching shares were booked at about $70.

Anyone who sold in April got a little over a third of what Anthropic booked each new matching share at, five months later. (They're different share classes, but both are slices of the same company.)

That includes the charity funds. Donor-advised funds sold at $25.91 too, just before the price more than doubled.

I don't think anyone did anything wrong here. The sellers got cash for a risky, private stock. The buyers took the risk.

But it shows how fast this company's price moves. And the match is priced at whatever the stock is worth on the day.

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The Quarter That Depends on a Donation Window

Anthropic's first filing points to one month: employee donations made in August 2026. (The amended filing drops the month and just says the charge was booked by 30 September.)

Employees can usually give shares only during windows Anthropic sets. The filing doesn't say why August. But in late August, the IPO was reportedly expected within weeks, and the plan lets Anthropic change or cancel outstanding matches when the company lists.

My reading: employees had good reasons to give before the IPO, and they did it all at once.

Here's what that does to the profit line:

• Q4 2025: $541 million of match.
• Q1 2026: $126 million.
• Q2 2026: zero. That's the quarter with the profit.
• Q3 2026: $1.96 billion.

The charge jumps around from quarter to quarter, and it can decide whether Anthropic reports a profit.

Anthropic's own adjusted figure strips the match out, with stock pay. On that view, Q3 operating income rose, from $2.24 billion to $2.46 billion. (As a share of revenue, it still fell, from 19% to 15%.)

Both numbers are true. Which one matters depends on whether you think the match is a real cost.

I think it is.

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Who Gets What

A charity match sounds like it only has one winner: the charity.

Reading the filing, I count four.

The employee gets a tax break. In the US, giving away shares you've held for over a year is usually deductible at their appraised value, with no capital-gains tax. Anthropic paid an outside firm to value the shares for employees in the program. The Amodeis used the same report for their own gifts.

The filing doesn't say what value that report used. But here's a rough sum for one share, for a top-bracket employee:

• Sell it in April at $25.91, pay federal tax on the gain, and keep about $19.75.
• Give it away instead, and the tax saving is about 35% of the appraised value.

Above an appraisal of about $56 a share, giving it away saves more in tax than selling would have put in your pocket. By Anthropic's own September numbers, a matching share worked out to about $70.

The employee doesn't get the match. That goes to charity. But the gift is cheaper than it looks.

The charity gets cash, eventually. Donor-advised funds sold Anthropic shares in the April sale. How much, and to whom the money then went, isn't disclosed.

The CEO gets votes. Dario Amodei votes the shares held by two of the charity funds, Daffy and Dechomai. Today that's 4.6 million shares, a small addition to his own 240 million. The agreements also cover shares those funds receive later. And a planned new share class gives employees one extra vote, on matters about Anthropic's governance trust, for every share they pledge to charity.

Anthropic gets a recruiting tool. The Information reported that Anthropic's executives call the match an important recruiting tool. The 3-for-1 rate only goes to people whose offer letter came before 17 May 2024.

And the other shareholders pay, through the new shares, as long as Anthropic keeps matching in shares.

Each piece is disclosed on its own. Read together, it looks to me like a well-designed machine: private stock goes in, and out come tax breaks, charity cash, votes and recruits.

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The Match Isn't Finished

The plan still holds about 906 million shares for future matches. That's roughly 5% of the company, measured on the share count Anthropic gives for 30 June.

On top of that:

• From 2027 to 2036, the plan's pool can grow by up to 1% of the shares every year. The board can set less.
• A separate public benefit fund, owned by Anthropic, already holds another 5%.

None of this has to be used. Employees have to donate, and Anthropic can pay a match in cash instead of shares.

But for anyone buying in the IPO, it's worth knowing.

Part of what you're buying is a company that has promised to give a slice of itself away. And when its staff donate, the bill shows up in the profit line, priced at what the stock is worth at the time.

The match is a fixed number of shares. So the higher the share price, the bigger the charge.

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What My Earlier Posts Got Right and Wrong

Q3 is the first quarter with full numbers since my last three posts. Here's how they held up.

Held:

• Demand. Q3 revenue was $16.96 billion, up 47% on Q2. It added $5.4 billion in a quarter.
• Customers are spreading out. No customer was above 10% of revenue in the first nine months. In Q3, the top five were about 21%.
• The new-model treadmill. Over 80% of Q3 revenue still came from models released in the last six months.

Changed:

• The profit. My S-1 post led with Q2's operating profit. It lasted one quarter. Without the match, Q3 would have stayed in profit.
• The lease pile. Leases signed but not yet started went from $321 billion in June to $451 billion in September. Anthropic now puts all its committed compute spending, leases and purchases together, at $895 billion.
• The Q4 test. A $100 billion yearly pace means about $25 billion a quarter. That's $8 billion more than Q3, a bigger jump than any quarter so far.

Corrections:

• I called about $8.7 billion the "real" first-half loss after the big accounting charge. The exact figure is $8.36 billion.
• I wrote that the benefit fund gets 2% more each time the stock rises 50% from the IPO price. That's up to 2%, and only if the board decides to.
• I wrote that the founders can sell 29% after 180 days. It's up to 29%, and the release can come earlier: two trading days after the Q1 2027 earnings report, if that comes first.

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Generous, and Expensive

I like that Anthropic's employees give this much. A 3-for-1 match on stock is far more generous than any company program I've seen.

It also cost more than the whole quarter's profit.

The match turned a profitable quarter into a loss, and the shares reserved for future matches are about 5% of the company.

Anyone buying in the IPO signs up for that too.

The share price at the next donation window will set what the next match costs.

This is how I'm reading the filing, not investment advice.