Anthropic Draft Prospectus Shows $80.7 Billion First-Half Loss, $72 Billion of It Non-Cash, WSJ Reports

Since Reuters first reported in September that Anthropic lost $42 billion in 2025 on $4.6 billion in revenue, the company's draft IPO prospectus has been updated with first-half 2026 results. The latest draft shows an $80.7 billion net loss for the six months ended June 30, up from $13 billion a year earlier, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, Oct. 20.

Revenue over the same stretch was $16.3 billion, up from $1.1 billion in the first half of 2025. That is more than triple the $4.6 billion Anthropic booked in all of last year.

Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment, and Reuters said it could not immediately verify the figures.

Where the loss comes from

About $72 billion of the loss comes from accounting charges tied to changes in the value of convertible notes and other financial instruments Anthropic issued to raise money, according to the draft. These are non-cash entries. No $72 billion left the company.

Subtract that figure and the remaining loss is roughly $8.7 billion. That is simple arithmetic on the reported totals, and it is still a large number for six months.

The operating cost behind it is compute. Anthropic spent nearly $9 billion on compute and infrastructure in the first half, up from $2.3 billion a year earlier. That already exceeds the $7.3 billion it spent in all of 2025, and it works out to about 55 cents of every revenue dollar.

Customer concentration

About one-fifth of first-half revenue came from just two customers, neither named. The draft says Anthropic's growth is tied to "a few big customers" and that it expects a significant portion of revenue to come from a limited number of customers for the foreseeable future.

That is a standard risk-factor warning. It is also a real one when two unnamed buyers account for roughly $3 billion or more of a half-year's sales.

The compute commitments

The draft puts long-term infrastructure obligations above $600 billion. About $450 billion of that is cloud agreements over the next seven to ten years, including $111 billion with Google, $110 billion with Amazon Web Services and $31 billion with Microsoft. The Journal reported that Anthropic could spend as much as $750 billion on computing capacity in the coming years.

Those commitments run far beyond the $20 billion in cash that the September draft showed. Revenue would have to keep compounding for the contracts to make sense.

What Anthropic and its backers point to

The case for the company rests on trajectory and on the nature of the loss. Anthropic told investors at its San Francisco investor day last week that third-quarter revenue rose 45% from the prior quarter to $16.8 billion, and that it was profitable on an adjusted basis in the quarter. The company's argument is that the headline loss mostly reflects its own rising valuation. Under accounting rules, a higher private share price increases the fair-value liability on convertible instruments held by earlier investors.

The skeptics are on the other side of that ledger. ZeroHedge wrote that "none of the structural flaws have been fixed" and pointed to the underlying loss, which already exceeds the roughly $8 billion operating loss it cites for all of 2025. Replies to the Journal reporter's post on social media warned that the risk would pass from venture investors to the public in an IPO, though those are anonymous reactions, not analysis.

What comes next

Anthropic is planning a November share sale, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley set to lead, according to Crypto Briefing. Four people familiar with the matter told Reuters that some current and prospective investors at the investor day were weighing a lower valuation; three of them said the discussion centered on around $1.5 trillion, down from the roughly $2 trillion previously expected.

The figures above come from a draft, not a public filing. The next step is the formal S-1, which would put audited numbers, the full customer-concentration language and the compute contracts in front of every prospective buyer. Anthropic has not said when that filing will be made.