Yet another Hacker News

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

67 points throwa356262 2 hours ago 31 comments

throwa356262 2 hours ago | parent

"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?

shakna 2 hours ago | parent

The corporate partners, who are also often investors, and have an interest in ensuring the world sees genAI as utterly required.

Microsoft, SK Group, Meta, Google, Oracle, etc.

throwa356262 1 hour ago | parent

I dont know, with the exception of SK, all these companies have announced reduced AI budgets and/or move to own inference.

luke5441 1 hour ago | parent

Maybe they did it like SpaceX and sold their compute to a competitor and are booking that as sales.

skrtskrt 1 hour ago | parent

Wasn't their previous revenue increase more than twice as big?

That would very much not be great for Anthropic, they need to be accelerating growth to keep valuation, doubly so as interest rates on corporate bonds continue to rise.

dgellow 20 minutes ago | parent

It’s actually not great, that’s a slowdown

xvxvx 2 hours ago | parent

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.

arcwhite 2 hours ago | parent

It can be two things!

saidnooneever 1 hour ago | parent

if the gamble is also con, it collapses to being just a con

saidnooneever 1 hour ago | parent

just use xhigh setting to support them through this AI winter brrrrr.

they are obviously a con ( opinion). look at last slop report. opus 5.5 gets _worse_ when u put higher attention settings. u get banned for using better harnesses etc. etc.

they could do really well. a lot of avid supporters. But i think if they do not change their tactics then openAI, GLM for those who can run it, or others, might start taking even those (pardon my french) religious fans.

0cf8612b2e1e 2 hours ago | parent

  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.

kolinko 1 hour ago | parent

Its revenue grew 12-fold year to year, and 50% just last quarter. Last quarter it reached profitability if you exclude convertibles etc. And if you won’t it is still well on track to be profitable this/next year.

It is actually faring much better than other tech startups ipo’ing over the last 20 years.

MisterMunchkin 1 hour ago | parent

It reached profitability if you exclude all costs (so it isn’t profitable lmao)

encyclopedism 35 minutes ago | parent

If revenue continues to increase like this we can expect Anthropic to make up 110% of the world's GDP very very soon (Rubs hand together).

JumpCrisscross 3 minutes ago | parent

Or world GDP to accelerate.

sigmar 1 hour ago | parent

Why leave out the time scales? 16.8B revenue for Q3 of 2026 and planning to spend 518B over 10 years (which would average to 13B quarterly)

ostracoda 2 hours ago | parent

lol

psygn89 1 hour ago | parent

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.

iririr 1 hour ago | parent

Apple will do it eventually

LoganDark 38 minutes ago | parent

Apple isn't doing this. Apple is creating experiences, not frontier models.

whiteboardr 15 minutes ago | parent

Infrastructure.

karp773 30 minutes ago | parent

> I think todays latest models would satisfy most users

This reminds we the famous (although unproven) "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

Gigachad 12 minutes ago | parent

There are probably cases where it's true though. 4K screens have been declared good enough, computers have come with 16GB of ram for forever now, etc.

dctwin 1 hour ago | parent

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

aurareturn 1 hour ago | parent

Probably stocks based compensation or something like that.

dannykwells 1 hour ago | parent

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 37 minutes ago | parent

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.

gonzalohm 10 minutes ago | parent

How are you going to find trustworthy financial statements of a company that's private and can cherry pick what they release?

tim333 28 minutes ago | parent

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.

quicklywilliam 26 minutes ago | parent

“The vast majority of this year's net loss, $72 billion, resulted from accounting charges tied to changes in the value of convertible notes and other instruments the company issued to raise funding, the Journal report said.”

Interesting, would love to know the details of this.

simonw 22 minutes ago | parent

> 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.)