Winners & losers: It's no secret that if you want some of the most lucrative compensation packages in tech, AI is the industry to be in. That's been perfectly illustrated by Anthropic's amended S-1 filing, which reveals its personnel costs recently averaged over $100,000 per employee per month.
The filing, spotted by Business Insider, shows that Anthropic recorded more than $1.7 billion in personnel expenses from July through to September. With 5,300 people working at the company, that works out at over $322,000 per person over the three-month span, or about $107,300 per employee per month.
Those costs include standard cash salaries along with bonuses, benefits, and employer payroll taxes. The largest share, $1.1 billion, came from Anthropic's stock-based compensation expenses, which reflect the value of company shares employees earn as part of their pay. Anthropic records that value as an expense even though employees don't receive the equivalent amount in cash.
As eye-watering as those figures sound, the wage bill takes up a much smaller slice of Anthropic's revenue than it once did. In 2023, the Claude maker spent more than twice as much on personnel as it brought in from customers. In the first nine months of 2026, personnel costs reached $4.8 billion, or about 15% of the $33.2 billion in revenue Anthropic reported for the same period.
Going public could change things pretty quickly. Anthropic has filed for what could be the biggest IPO ever. Some of its restricted stock units come with two conditions: employees have to work at the company for a certain length of time, and an event such as an IPO has to take place.
Had Anthropic completed its IPO on September 30, 2026, it says it would have recorded an $8.2 billion stock-based compensation charge that day for restricted stock units. That single charge would have exceeded the $4.86 billion Anthropic reported in personnel expenses for the first nine months of 2026. The company expected to recognize another $24.1 billion in expense for those awards over a weighted-average period of about two years, according to its amended filing.
Anthropic has some well-funded competition in the AI business. Last year, OpenAI boss Sam Altman claimed Meta had offered some of his employees $100 million signing bonuses to jump ship. Anthropic has managed to grow its workforce fivefold since the end of 2024, though that still leaves it with fewer than a tenth as many employees as Meta, which has around 67,000 people on its payroll.