After securing substantial funding, will Anthropic initiate a price war? I found the answer in its prospectus. Amazon, Google, Broadcom, and AMD have collectively provided or committed approximately $133.3 billion in funding to Anthropic, in exchange for roughly $405.7 billion in compute orders—roughly $3 in orders for every $1 invested. Anthropic has used minimal cash to lock in compute capacity far exceeding its own scale, while the cloud giants have converted their investments in Anthropic into guaranteed orders for their own cloud services and chips. The contracted compute capacity must ultimately be monetized by selling tokens; after going public, Anthropic will have no shortage of cash—approximately $131.7 billion in cash and short-term investments as of end-June, plus an additional $77 billion in undrawn strategic notes and a $15 billion revolving credit facility. However, the $405.7 billion in binding compute payment obligations mean that if Anthropic faces a competitive downturn similar to the third quarter, it will almost certainly lower prices—especially since post-IPO financials will be transparent. Currently, with locked-in capacity and growing demand, token prices can be maintained. But the contracted compute capacity represents a hard cost regardless of utilization—if tokens aren’t sold, they must still be sold at a discount, just like clearing inventory. At that point, no one will defend prices—market penetration will be the priority. If infrastructure investment has been overdone, this dynamic will be validated within the next two years.