How expensive are Anthropic’s employees now? The company spends more than $100,000 per employee per month on average—that’s $1.3 million a year.
In its S-1 prospectus, updated yesterday, Anthropic disclosed a staggering figure: personnel costs reached $1.711 billion in the third quarter of 2026.
Based on roughly 5,300 employees at the end of the quarter, that works out to an average of $107,600 per employee per month.
Of course, this doesn’t mean employees actually take home $100,000 in salary every month. Of the $1.711 billion, $1.07 billion came from stock-based compensation, accounting for more than 62%. The remaining $641 million also includes salaries, bonuses, benefits, and payroll taxes paid by the employer.
But the really staggering figure comes next.
Anthropic still has as much as $32.3 billion in RSU compensation expense that has yet to be recognized. As the company goes public, these expenses will begin to flow into its financial statements on a large scale.
I think there’s a really interesting phenomenon here: the value of AI talent is increasingly tied to company valuations. For a company like Anthropic, equity itself is an important bargaining chip in the race for top talent. Employees are willing to accept large equity packages, while the company needs sustained business and valuation growth to back up those promises.
And Anthropic can certainly afford to do that.
At the end of 2024, the company had only about 940 employees. By September this year, that number had grown to 5,300, yet revenue per employee over the past 12 months still exceeded $6.6 million.
This may be a very unusual feature of the AI era: a company can have both extraordinarily expensive employees and astonishingly high output per employee.
Compute is getting more expensive, and talent is getting more expensive. But as long as leading model companies can maintain this pace of growth, they’ll be able to keep pushing prices higher.
In the end, perhaps only a handful of companies will truly be able to afford this talent race.
In its S-1 prospectus, updated yesterday, Anthropic disclosed a staggering figure: personnel costs reached $1.711 billion in the third quarter of 2026.
Based on roughly 5,300 employees at the end of the quarter, that works out to an average of $107,600 per employee per month.
Of course, this doesn’t mean employees actually take home $100,000 in salary every month. Of the $1.711 billion, $1.07 billion came from stock-based compensation, accounting for more than 62%. The remaining $641 million also includes salaries, bonuses, benefits, and payroll taxes paid by the employer.
But the really staggering figure comes next.
Anthropic still has as much as $32.3 billion in RSU compensation expense that has yet to be recognized. As the company goes public, these expenses will begin to flow into its financial statements on a large scale.
I think there’s a really interesting phenomenon here: the value of AI talent is increasingly tied to company valuations. For a company like Anthropic, equity itself is an important bargaining chip in the race for top talent. Employees are willing to accept large equity packages, while the company needs sustained business and valuation growth to back up those promises.
And Anthropic can certainly afford to do that.
At the end of 2024, the company had only about 940 employees. By September this year, that number had grown to 5,300, yet revenue per employee over the past 12 months still exceeded $6.6 million.
This may be a very unusual feature of the AI era: a company can have both extraordinarily expensive employees and astonishingly high output per employee.
Compute is getting more expensive, and talent is getting more expensive. But as long as leading model companies can maintain this pace of growth, they’ll be able to keep pushing prices higher.
In the end, perhaps only a handful of companies will truly be able to afford this talent race.
