Anthropic's Ad Spend Jumped From $33M to $147M in One Year

By Grace Kim

Anthropic spent $147 million on advertising last year, up from $33 million in 2024 — and the company's S-1 filing shows another $273 million added in just the first half of 2026. That 2025 figure alone outpaces Duolingo's entire 2025 sales and marketing budget of $125.7 million, a company that built its brand on marketing. The numbers come from the regulatory paperwork Anthropic filed ahead of its stock market listing.

Claude won't be carrying ads when Anthropic goes public, the filing makes clear. But plenty of ads will be carrying Claude.

The filing attributes the 2025 rise to "higher media and public relations spend to support product launches." The math tracks. Anthropic had little to advertise in 2023, when its ad spend was so small the filing called it "not material" and full-year revenue was just $41 million. Then came Claude Code in February 2025, a run of new models ending with Opus 4.5 in November, and Claude Cowork in January 2026. More launches meant more to sell, and sales and marketing costs rose in every quarter the filing covers, with the biggest jumps in the first half of 2026.

What does the spend buy?

Spending still looks small against Anthropic's total costs. Sales, marketing and partnership costs hit $3.17 billion in the first half of 2026 — but $2.7 billion of that increase went to cloud companies that resell Claude.

The rest appears to be working, at least on paper. The filing lists Opus 4.5 among the reasons quarterly revenue growth jumped from 48% in the last quarter of 2025 to 132% in the first quarter of 2026. First-half revenue reached $16.3 billion, versus $1.2 billion in the same period a year earlier.

Here's the caveat. Anthropic gets paid when people use Claude. Usage fees brought in $13.1 billion of that $16.3 billion, with fixed-fee subscriptions making up the rest. The filing expects usage to remain "the substantial majority of total revenue for the foreseeable future." So growth depends on getting people to lean on Claude harder — each extra coding job on a metered account adds to the bill. The ad budget, in other words, is a revenue engine, not vanity spend. It's not shrinking.

Why the brand anxiety?

The S-1 doesn't hide why. "The promotion of our brand requires us to make substantial expenditures, which we anticipate will increase as our market becomes more competitive," it reads. Anthropic also concedes 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 eMarketer principal analyst Nate Elliott, who covers AI in marketing and commerce. "They use the word 'brand' more than 50 times just in the risks section. Although, to be fair, that section is almost 100 pages long."

The filing also warns Anthropic could be "grouped with other industry participants and judged similarly, regardless of differences in our approach or conduct," and flags the risk that perception its products "contribute to job displacement" could generate negative coverage. The worry has run under the AI race all year: the models are close enough in capability that reputation carries real weight.

How does Claude stay ad-free?

Anthropic has spent 2026 positioning itself as a different kind of AI company, and it has cost it. After the company said in February its tech shouldn't be used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons, President Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using Claude and the Department of War labeled Anthropic a "supply-chain risk to national security." Anthropic sued and won largely in a California federal court in August. But a Washington appeals court upheld the risk label 2-1 in September, and Anthropic has asked the full court to reconsider.

It also held back its most powerful model, releasing Mythos in April only as a gated cybersecurity preview. Keeping ads out of Claude fits the same pitch — the filing cites "monetization strategies that differ from those of certain competitors" as a differentiator. It doesn't name OpenAI, which started running ads in ChatGPT in February, but it doesn't need to. Anthropic used this year's Super Bowl to promise Claude stays 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," Elliott said. "Under current market conditions, they're right to consider maintaining a positive brand image paramount."

Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment. Expect the ad bill to keep climbing.