Anthropic Lost 80.7 Billion Dollars in Six Months, and 72 Billion of It Is Paper: the Draft IPO Filing Reviewed by Reuters

A draft IPO registration filing reviewed by Reuters shows Anthropic recorded a net loss of 80.7 billion dollars in the first half of 2026, up from 13 billion dollars in the same period a year earlier. The number looks apocalyptic, but most of it never left the building.

Roughly 72 billion dollars of the loss is accounting, not cash: it reflects the rising fair value of convertible notes and other financing instruments the startup issued to early investors. As Anthropic's valuation has soared, the value of those instruments has grown with it, and accounting rules book that growth as a loss. Amazon alone held Anthropic convertible notes valued at 97.9 billion dollars by June 30, up from 45.8 billion at the end of last year, according to figures cited in coverage of the filing.

The operating picture underneath is very different. Revenue for the six months to June 30 came to 16.3 billion dollars, up from 1.1 billion a year earlier — nearly fifteenfold growth. The Wall Street Journal reported separately that third-quarter revenue rose about 45 percent from the second quarter to 16.8 billion dollars and that the company was adjusted-profitable in the quarter, though those figures have not been independently audited.

What is genuinely burning cash is compute. Anthropic spent nearly 9 billion dollars on infrastructure in the first half, more than the 7.3 billion dollars it spent in all of 2025, and the filing reportedly contemplates as much as 750 billion dollars of further compute purchases in the years ahead. About 450 billion dollars of cloud deals are already signed over a seven-to-ten-year horizon, most of them non-cancellable: Google accounts for 111 billion dollars, Amazon 110 billion and Microsoft 31 billion.

The filing also lays out a structural tension. Roughly a fifth to a quarter of revenue comes from just two customers, and the company warns that revenue will remain concentrated for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, the three cloud giants bankrolling its compute are all building competing models — Anthropic is, in effect, paying its rivals for the capacity it needs to compete with them.

Investors appear to be marking the story down at the margins. People involved in the IPO roadshow said valuation discussions have centered near 1.5 trillion dollars, below the 2 trillion figure floated earlier this year, and Yahoo Finance has reported the S-1 could be filed as soon as Friday. None of those numbers is final, and the company has not commented officially.

The takeaway: the 80.7 billion headline is mostly an artifact of Anthropic's own fundraising success, but the underlying story — fifteenfold revenue growth, 9 billion dollars of half-year compute spend and 450 billion dollars in locked-in cloud commitments — is one of the most aggressive capital structures ever attached to a private company. Whether the arithmetic closes depends on frontier-model revenue compounding faster than the compute bills.