Anthropic's IPO numbers, the New York Times sues Brave, and Oracle's $20 billion ask

Monday, November 2, was a day about what AI costs, and who pays for it.

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, published its latest financials ahead of its stock market debut, and the numbers were very large in both directions. The New York Times and three other newspapers sued Brave, the browser company, saying it has been passing their articles on to AI companies. Apple said memory chip prices are higher than anything it has seen. Oracle asked investors for $20 billion to keep building data centers, and its shares dropped. And Salesforce agreed to buy Cresta, a startup whose AI answers customer service calls.

Here's what happened, in plain English.

Anthropic's numbers before its IPO

Anthropic is getting ready to go public. That's called an IPO, or initial public offering: the moment a private company starts selling its shares on the stock market, so anyone can buy them. Before that happens, a company has to file a document with the US Securities and Exchange Commission called an S-1. It lays out the company's finances and the risks it sees in its own business, so investors know what they're buying.

Anthropic made its first S-1 public in late October, but that version only covered the first half of the year. On Monday it filed an amended version with numbers through the end of September, and CNBC went through them.

The headline figure is revenue. From July to September, Anthropic says it brought in about $17 billion. That's up roughly 1,127% from the same three months last year, which means more than 12 times as much. Over the first nine months of the year, revenue came to $33.24 billion.

The growth is slowing, though, at least compared with earlier in the year. Revenue rose about 47% from the second quarter to the third. In the first quarter it had grown 132% over the quarter before, and in the second quarter 144%.

The company is also losing a lot of money. Its net loss for July to September was $23.29 billion. For the first nine months of the year, the net loss was $104 billion, compared with $25.1 billion in the same period of 2025. CNBC notes that most of that nine-month loss came from changes in the fair value of convertible notes and derivative liabilities. In plain terms, those are accounting changes in the value of some of its financial instruments, not money spent on day-to-day running costs.

The number that stands out most is the one about what Anthropic has promised to spend. The filing lists about $895.4 billion in purchase commitments and lease agreements, and says "substantially all" of it is related to compute and infrastructure. Compute is the industry's word for computing power: the chips and data centers that train AI models and run them when people use them. According to the filing, Anthropic's compute and infrastructure expenses rose $14.4 billion over the nine months, a 329% increase from a year earlier.

The S-1 also includes more than 90 pages of risk factors, the section where a company lists what could go wrong. Anthropic's co-founders write in the filing that they consider it their "personal responsibility to help the world understand these risks."

There's no listing date or share price yet. CNBC reports that Anthropic is preparing to start its roadshow, the stretch of meetings where a company pitches itself to big investors before its shares go on sale. CNBC also points out that OpenAI confidentially filed for its own IPO in June and has signaled a debut in 2027.

The New York Times sues Brave

Meanwhile, a new legal fight over news articles and AI. On Monday, the New York Times sued Brave in federal court in Manhattan. Brave is an 11-year-old company best known for its privacy-focused web browser.

The Times says Brave scraped its copyrighted articles and unlawfully distributed them to paying customers. Scraping means using software to automatically copy what's on websites. The lawsuit names Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere as those customers. It describes Brave as a "supplier, dealer, and distributor of stolen copyrighted content" for AI companies, and compares it to a fence, someone who sells stolen goods to others.

According to TechCrunch's report on the filing, the suit says Brave built an index of more than 30 billion web pages using a crawler it didn't identify, which left publishers unable to block it. A crawler is the program that visits web pages and copies them. The suit also targets a feature in Brave's browser that it says gets around paywalls, and Brave's practice of blocking publishers' ads while selling ads of its own. The Times is asking for damages and an injunction, a court order that would make Brave stop.

On the same day, three other papers, the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel, filed a similar lawsuit in the same court.

TechCrunch reported that Brave did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Times has already sued OpenAI and Perplexity over similar claims, so this is the latest in a long line of cases between publishers and the companies that build or supply AI. None of the claims in the new suits have been tested in court yet.

Apple and the memory crunch

Next, Apple, and a problem that's reaching across the tech industry: memory chips. Memory is the part of a computer that holds information while it works. AI data centers need enormous amounts of it, there's a shortage, and prices keep climbing.

Apple's latest quarterly results, covered by TechCrunch on Monday, show how that is playing out. Apple's inventory, the parts and finished products it holds in stock, grew to $14.54 billion at the end of its fiscal fourth quarter, from $11.09 billion the quarter before. That's a 31% jump in three months, and up 154% from $5.72 billion a year earlier. TechCrunch describes it as Apple stockpiling inventory, particularly computer memory.

On the earnings call, CEO John Ternus put it plainly: "What we're seeing with memory pricing right now is unprecedented." He said Apple expects "even higher memory costs" in the December quarter, and for those costs to keep rising after that.

That shows up in Apple's forecast. The company expects a gross margin of 45% to 46% for the December quarter, down from 47.9% in the September quarter, and it largely attributes the drop to memory. Gross margin is the share of each sale a company keeps after paying what it cost to make the product.

There were other signs of strain. iPad revenue came in at $6.2 billion, down 10% from a year earlier and below the $6.7 billion analysts expected; Apple blamed supply constraints. Apple already raised prices on some Mac and iPad models at the end of June, and on iPhones in September. TechCrunch reports that Apple's chief operating officer, Sabih Khan, who joined the call to answer memory questions, did not rule out more price increases.

So the memory shortage isn't only a story about data centers. It can reach the devices people buy.

Oracle raises $20 billion

Oracle is one of the big companies building data centers for AI. On Monday, according to SEC filings reported by CNBC, it moved to sell $10 billion in new common stock and $10 billion in senior notes, a type of bond. A bond is essentially a loan from investors that a company pays back with interest. The filing says the money will go to general corporate purposes, which may include capital spending, paying down debt and future investments.

None of this came out of nowhere. Oracle outlined the plan at its investor day the week before, where it also forecast at least $225 billion in revenue for fiscal 2030. It said the $20 billion would be the limit on new money it raises from the capital markets for its investment cycle running through fiscal 2030. The rest is meant to come from vendor financing, hardware provided by customers and customer prepayments.

Investors weren't reassured. Oracle's shares fell 8.8% on Monday, after bouncing following the investor day. They are down 33% this year and 50% over the past 12 months.

Part of the concern is debt. Oracle had $125.34 billion in debt as of August 31, mostly in senior notes. In July, S&P downgraded Oracle to BBB-, one notch above high yield, the riskier tier often called junk. CNBC notes that the cost of insuring Oracle's debt against default has risen sharply over the past year.

Not everyone saw Monday's filing as bad news. Baird analyst Rob Oliver said, "This seems to be exactly what they previewed," and questioned the market's reaction. UBS analyst Karl Keirstead called the funding "a major relief" given concerns about debt markets. Oracle expects to be free cash flow positive, meaning it brings in more cash than it spends, in the second half of 2028.

Salesforce buys Cresta

And finally, a deal closer to everyday work. Salesforce, which makes software that businesses use to manage their customers, announced on Monday that it has signed an agreement to buy Cresta.

Cresta makes AI voice agents: AI that can talk on the phone and handle complex customer calls from start to finish. Its platform also coaches human customer service representatives in real time, analyzes every conversation, and tests and improves the voice agents themselves. Salesforce names Marriott, Comcast and Alaska Airlines among Cresta's customers.

The plan is to combine Salesforce's customer records and workflow tools with Cresta's voice agents and conversation analysis, so each call can be tied to what happened next, such as whether the problem was solved or the customer stayed. Kishan Chetan, who runs Agentforce and Service Cloud at Salesforce, said voice is "where service is hardest to get right." Cresta's CEO, Ping Wu, said joining Salesforce would let the company realize its "full vision at scale."

Salesforce did not say how much it is paying. The deal still needs regulatory approval and is expected to close in the first quarter of Salesforce's fiscal 2028, which is early next year. After it closes, Cresta will keep supporting the call center and phone systems its customers already use.

It's a bet that more of the calls people make to hotels, cable companies and airlines will be handled, or helped, by AI.

The big picture

Put Monday's stories side by side and the common thread is cost. Anthropic's revenue is growing very fast, and it has also committed to nearly $900 billion in spending, almost all of it on computing power. Oracle, one of the companies building that kind of capacity, is borrowing and selling shares to pay for it, and investors are nervous about the debt. Apple, far from the data center business, is paying more for memory chips as AI demand grows, and its customers have already seen price rises.

Then there's the question of the raw material. AI models are built from huge amounts of text, including news articles. The lawsuits against Brave are the latest attempt by publishers to draw that line in court, and how judges rule in cases like these will shape what AI companies can use, and at what price.

Meanwhile, the AI itself keeps moving into ordinary places, like the voice that answers when you call customer service. The money is enormous, and so are the questions about who ends up paying.