Anthropic, the US company that makes the Claude AI chatbot, recorded a net loss of $80.7 billion in the six months to June 30, 2026. About $72 billion of that loss came from an accounting charge, not cash spent, according to a draft IPO prospectus reviewed by The Wall Street Journal on October 20, 2026.
A prospectus is the document a company must publish before it sells shares to the public for the first time, known as an IPO. Anthropic has not yet made its prospectus public.
Where the $72 billion charge came from
Anthropic raised part of its money through convertible notes. These are a kind of loan from investors that can later turn into shares in the company.
As Anthropic’s value has risen, these notes have become worth more. Accounting rules make the company record that rise as a loss, even though no money leaves its bank account, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Take that charge out, and the loss is about $8.7 billion. That is still large, but it is roughly one-ninth of the headline figure.
The same pattern showed up last year. Anthropic lost $42 billion in all of 2025, and more than $34 billion of that came from similar accounting adjustments, according to the filing.
Sales grew almost 15 times in a year
Revenue jumped to about $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, up from $1.1 billion in the same period of 2025. That is nearly 15 times higher in one year. In all of 2025, the company earned about $4.6 billion.
Real spending also climbed fast. Anthropic spent nearly $9 billion on computing power and data centres in the six months, close to four times the $2.3 billion it spent a year earlier. That half-year bill was already more than the $7.3 billion it spent in all of 2025.
For comparison, the net loss in the first half of 2025 was about $13 billion.
Over $600 billion promised for computing
The filing shows Anthropic has signed long-term deals to buy computing power worth more than $600 billion. These include about $111 billion with Google, $110 billion with Amazon Web Services and $31 billion with Microsoft, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Anthropic says it will pay these amounts “regardless of actual usage,” according to the filing. It has also agreed to spend up to $86 billion renting Nvidia chips from Nscale and Lambda, and more than $160 billion to lease Google chips through a deal with Broadcom.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on the loss.
The company confidentially submitted a draft IPO filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission on June 1, 2026. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Anthropic is aiming to list its shares in November, though the date has not been confirmed.
