Anthropic recorded a staggering $80B net loss in the first half of 2026
twitter.com
twitter.com
EDIT: Found a better source than a gambling site's social media.
Kinda funny remembering how many HN comments I've read in the last few months insisting "Anthropic is profitable now" because of those cherry picked numbers for one quarter.
https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-recorded-net-loss...
Their revenue "more than doubled from the first quarter to $11.6 billion in the second quarter" which is less than almost tripling so first quarter revenue might've been $11.6B/2.5 ≈ $4.6B for $16.2B total revenue in the first half. To get that revenue, they "spent nearly $9 billion on computing capacity and infrastructure in the first half." Scaling up for the $16.8B third-quarter revenue suggests $9.3B compute spend. Meanwhile to get the $8B remaining first-half loss, they must've had $24.2B expenses, $15.2B of which are not compute, so about $7.6B per quarter. If that stays fixed, total third-quarter expenses should be about $16.9B, fairly close to revenue. I think reporting that their second quarter was profitable focused on the operating income exceeding operating expenses only.
So there are actually several senses in which Anthropic could be profitable or fail to be:
1. Are operations bringing in more money than they cost? (Supposedly already happened.)
2. Are operations bringing in enough money to fund capital expenses? (Maybe close, maybe barely so.)
3. Does investing in Anthropic yield good returns?
Note that the last point crucially depends on their stock price. If it drops a little, those "bonds that could eventually convert into Anthropic shares" start showing up on the positive side of the balance sheet instead. Insofar as the stock market is efficient, if they IPO, it will be priced such that it's no longer obvious whether it's better or worse than any other investment. But early investors and founders will make bank.
And we haven’t even got to the part where AI consumer pricing corrects to realistic models. Once that hits, companies will drop AI like a hot potato.
If anyone believed that they could replace humans with AI bots at a fraction of the cost, they’re about to have a major wake up call.
That ship has sailed. If you're a mid-sized company, with the resources of a mid-sized company, you'll always be able to download Deepseek's new Flash model and run it on your own hardware.
With all of the competition out there, prices arguably can't rise much further than they already have.
Meanwhile, we've had a AI-group that's almost 6 years now, where we've explored the models and uses since they became commercially available.
We're trying to get the word out that our colleagues should not get too invested or locked to a single model or supplier. Try to become a vendor-agnostic AI user, while we're working on rolling out org wide local models and tools.
We really do have to remind users, all the time, that the price they pay right now for a monthly subscription, might blow up anytime - as these subscriptions are obviously heavily subsidized.
Looks like 2026 will be so much worse.
So they are attracting people who want to bet on losses & profits of companies before IPO? How could society get here? :-D
This has been Anthropic's playbook since day one: be first to have an amazing AI, lock everyone in, raise prices a ton, become rich. When they realized they would never be able to lock people in with a better product, suddenly AIs started "going rogue" ... so they can lock people in with US government regulations (that only Anthropic and a few others can meet).
They have "bet the farm" on trying to follow that playbook, and have taken on huge debt (plus they've made some "fuzzy" business relationships that are almost loans) ... and all of this has been going on for years. We're just getting more articles as their "long term bet" gets closer and closer to failing, but again: this isn't news.