Anthropic logged net loss of over $80B in first half of 2026

throwa356262

"Anthropic's third-quarter revenue rose 45% to $16.8 billion" This is great for Anthropic, but who is increasing their AI spending in this climate?

xvxvx

Keep throwing money into the wishing well. This has been, since day one, either a gamble or a complete con, depending on how in touch with reality you are.

0cf8612b2e1e

Reuters reported first in September that Anthropic posted a net loss of $42 billion in 2025 and plans to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in coming years. $16B revenue and hoping to spend $500B in the coming years.

psygn89

I think todays latest models would satisfy most users, so it makes me wonder how soon until we can run it on our machines without having to subscribe and with China handing us freebies? I think they have dug well past the point of profitable returns before that happens, so I can see why big tech companies are scrambling to get into bed with US government more than ever as a backup plan when/if their big gamble fails. And now our corrupt government and its 3 letter agencies, they have bargaining power to use this tech and relax privacy efforts and add more backdoors for "safety and security" whereas in the past it was easier for these companies to say no. A match made in hell that we are all roped into now.

dctwin

Important to note that $72bn of that loss is some accounting thing and not really relevant wrt. the solvency of Anthropic

aurareturn

Probably stocks based compensation or something like that.

dannykwells

From Bloomberg: The overwhelming majority of the net loss in the first half of this year, $72 billion, resulted from accounting charges linked to changes in the value of convertible notes and other instruments Anthropic has issued, according to the report. So this is really just capped notes converting. Total nothing burger.

FloorEgg

Lots of people really want to convince the public there is a bubble. Hmmm... My advice: if you actually want to know the truth of what is going on, get a general understanding of finance and read the actual financial statements/filings and their disclaimers. It's very easy to write articles like this that cherry pick certain numbers out of context to support a specific narrative. Reuters is in the process of liquidating their reputation in the same way that forbes and business insider and many others publications have.

tim333

The loss without accounting adjustments was $8.7 billion for H1. The other $72 billion was non-cash adjustment. Revenue was $16.3 billion for H1 2026, up from $1.1 billion for H1 2025. Not actually that bad.

simonw

> The loss, up from $13 billion a year earlier, was driven by $72 billion in accounting charges tied to changes in the value of financial instruments Anthropic issued to raise money, the report said, citing a draft prospectus for its IPO. Does that mean they lost $8bn in actual cash? I'm trying to understand how that matches up to their earlier reported claims that Q2 and Q3 were "profitable". (Oh wait, this $80bn loss is reported for "the first half" of 2026, so it's not including the supposedly profitable Q3.)

red_green_yell

The real headlines here: - $450B of non-cancellable cloud commitments over the next 10 years >> the revenue gravy train cannot stop or Anthro is toast. - 20% of revenue is from just 2 customers >> If their highly concentrated customers get smart and start looking at low cost (meta, grok, google) or open weight (nvidia, inkling, reflection) models it's all bad news for Anthro. This isn't happening now but it's the sort of thing that barely moves until it moves all at once. As others have mentioned $72b of $80b headline is a non cash (but still relevant) accounting line.

MiroslavPokorny

Anyone can lose a $1, it takes something special to drop $80B.

sakesun

And 5% of that loss is dedicated for the 'public good'

evanb

I thought all of this machine learning business was about minimizing the loss.

epsteingpt

Fable 5.5 better be incredible.