Anthropic's Ad Spend Jumped From $33M to $147M Ahead of IPO

By Tom Whitfield

Anthropic's advertising spend rose from $33 million in 2024 to $147 million last year, according to the S-1 filing the AI company lodged with U.S. regulators before its stock market listing. That figure outstrips Duolingo's entire 2025 sales and marketing budget of $125.7 million — an app built its business on marketing. The outlay kept climbing: marketing and advertising costs rose another $273 million in the first six months of this year versus the same period a year earlier.

The ad budget remains small within Anthropic's total costs. Sales, marketing and partnership costs hit $3.17 billion in the first half of 2026, but $2.7 billion of the increase went to cloud companies that resell Claude.

The contrast with 2023 is stark. Back then, ad spend was so small the S-1 called it "not material." Claude had only gone on commercial sale that first quarter, and full-year revenue was $41 million.

Why the budget grew so fast

The product portfolio expanded. Claude Code launched in February 2025. New models followed across the year, ending with Opus 4.5 in November. Claude Cowork, which applies the Claude Code approach to everyday office work, arrived in January 2026.

The S-1 attributes the 2025 rise to "higher media and public relations spend to support product launches," and gives the same reason, minus the PR, for 2026. Sales and marketing costs rose every quarter the filing covers, with the biggest jumps in the first half of 2026.

The spending appears to have worked. The filing lists Opus 4.5 among the reasons quarterly revenue growth accelerated from 48% in the final quarter of 2025 to 132% in the first quarter of 2026. First-half revenue reached $16.3 billion, up from $1.2 billion a year earlier.

What does usage-based revenue have to do with ads?

Anthropic gets paid when people use Claude. Usage fees — billed like an electricity meter, by workload and model — delivered $13.1 billion of the $16.3 billion first-half total. Subscriptions made up the rest. The filing expects usage to remain "the substantial majority of total revenue for the foreseeable future."

Growth therefore depends on making people lean on Claude harder, and each metered coding job adds to the bill. "The promotion of our brand requires us to make substantial expenditures, which we anticipate will increase as our market becomes more competitive," the filing reads. Anthropic also warns it "may fall behind competitors with more established or widely recognized brands."

"This document makes it exceptionally clear that they consider their brand one of their greatest assets," said Nate Elliott, principal analyst for AI in marketing and commerce at eMarketer. "They use the word 'brand' more than 50 times just in the risks section."

How politics and positioning shaped the year

Anthropic spent 2026 positioning itself as a different kind of AI company, at a cost. In February it said its tech should not be used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. President Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using Claude, and the Department of War labelled Anthropic a "supply-chain risk to national security." Anthropic sued. A California federal court ruled largely in its favor in August, but a Washington appeals court upheld the supply-chain designation 2-1 in September. Anthropic has asked the full court to review it.

It also held back its most powerful model, releasing Mythos in April only as a gated preview for cybersecurity organizations, citing "advanced capabilities in cyber vulnerability discovery."

Keeping ads out of Claude is part of the same pitch. The filing lists "monetization strategies that differ from those of certain competitors" as a differentiator. OpenAI began running ads in ChatGPT in February, and Anthropic used this year's Super Bowl to say Claude will stay ad-free, arguing enterprise customers deliver "higher monetization than consumer AI."

"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," Elliott said. "Under current market conditions, they're right to consider maintaining a positive brand image paramount."

The ad money has two jobs: putting Claude in front of more people, and ensuring Anthropic's own name — not the industry's reputation — is what sticks. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.