Hacker News Reader

Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

> It reported a $104 billion net loss during the period, though most of that was due to the change in fair value of convertible notes and derivative liabilities.

Look, I've seen and I understand the arguments that the GAAP income adjustment for this kind of thing is fake, but a number of them seemed to take it for granted that it was a "one-time" adjustment. If it's going to keep happening I really feel like we ought to insist on a more comprehensive argument. The accounting principle must be generally accepted for a reason: what shenanigans could someone get up to by reporting net income without this adjustment, and how do we know Anthropic is not getting up to those shenanigans?

View on HN

It’s like shareholder dilution from issuing more stock or stock options. Existing shareholders might have a smaller share of the company than they thought. The accounting is weird.

We aren’t shareholders, though, so why should we care?

>We aren’t shareholders, though, so why should we care?

They're going through an IPO, so unless this is a one-off thing, people reading this thread will become shareholders, either directly or through their pension pots.

Sometimes accounting is weird because it's necessary to prevent tricks. Why do all your held-to-maturity bonds become "tainted" and get revalued at market prices when you sell a couple, even though nothing has changed about them? Because any other rule would let a company which cannot in fact hold bonds to maturity get up to tricks and systematically overstate their assets.

So while yes, this does look a lot like shareholder dilution, that doesn't really satisfy the question of why it's not treated that way under GAAP. Perhaps GAAP is just wrong, or perhaps there's some possible tricks which Anthropic is provably not engaging in. What it's definitely not is a one-time adjustment now that it's happened in two consecutive quarters.

It's a good question: why are the GAAP rules what they are? It needs to be investigated, though.

The reason it happens in multiple quarters is likely that Anthropic's valuation has increased in multiple quarters. Every time Anthropic's valuation increases, the convertible bonds are worth more money. Other shareholders have "lost" money compared to what would have happened if Anthropic had sold regular bonds instead of convertible bonds. Except that no, the value of their shares is increasing too. An increased valuation is actually good for them.

That's how equity works. If someone owns 1% of a company and its valuation doubles, their share is worth twice as much and so is yours and we wouldn't even normally consider it to be diluting the other shareholders.

So the question is whether convertible bonds are worth more than regular bonds and the answer is, yes, absolutely, but they are partially equity, and it's the equity part that's increasing when the company's valuation is increasing.

And if the company's valuation went down then the value of the equity part of the convertible bonds would decrease. Maybe that would be a profit by GAAP rules?

> The bond market works best when there’s an end in sight, Lyman noted. Every AI investor believes there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. We just have no idea how long this tunnel is.[0]

It is like someone who loses repeatedly at Roshambo while saying: "Okay, then. Best two out of three- three out of five- four out of seven- five out of nine..."

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/10/30/business/ai-stocks-bonds-...

Lol, pretty much exactly that. "Wait wait, I wasn't ready yet."

These are all supposed to convert to regular shares at or around IPO IIRC. If they're still pulling that crap after that point we'll know. There's an end date for those contracts that we're expecting

Reply on news.ycombinator.com