Anthropic, the company behind Claude, recorded a net loss of about $80.7 billion in the first half of 2026, according to a preliminary draft of its IPO prospectus reported by the Wall Street Journal. The number will travel fast. What sits underneath it matters more.
Most of the loss is on paper
About $72 billion of the loss came from non-cash accounting adjustments linked to convertible notes and other financing instruments, according to the Journal's reporting. Non-cash means no money left the company for those charges; they reflect changes in how those instruments are valued on the books. Without them, the loss is still large, but a fraction of the headline.
Revenue grew about fifteen times
First-half revenue was $16.3 billion, up from $1.1 billion in the same period of 2025. About 20% of it came from just two customers, and the draft says Anthropic expects a small number of customers to keep providing a large share of revenue.
The real cost is compute
Anthropic spent nearly $9 billion on computing capacity and infrastructure in the first six months, more than the $7.3 billion it spent in all of 2025. The draft lists about $450 billion of noncancelable cloud agreements over the next decade, including $111 billion with Google Cloud, $110 billion with Amazon Web Services and $31 billion with Microsoft. It says it could spend up to $750 billion on more capacity, including deals still under negotiation, and that it wanted more capacity than the big cloud companies were willing to supply.
The draft also lists risks including model alignment, catastrophic incidents and AI security events whose damages could exceed its insurance. The listing could value Anthropic at about $2 trillion; no date has been reported. Anthropic recently said about 20% of its shares are set aside for public benefit, including a new [public benefit fund](https://readthestak.com/articles/anthropic-public-benefit-fund-5-percent-shares/).
