Anthropic reports $80.7bn first-half loss in draft IPO filing as cloud costs mount

The loss and what drove it

Anthropic posted a net loss of $80.7bn in the first half of 2026, according to a draft prospectus that the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, 20 October. The same period a year earlier showed a loss of $13bn. About $72bn of the total came from accounting effects linked to changes in the value of convertible bonds and other financial instruments the company issued to raise capital. The company told investors that it reached profitability on an adjusted basis in the third quarter, a claim Bloomberg had reported before the Journal's account. No statement from Anthropic was available at first, and the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment from TechCrunch.

Revenue and customer concentration

Revenue reached $16.3bn in the first half of 2026, compared with $1.1bn in the same period of 2025, according to a draft prospectus cited by EL PAÍS. Roughly a fifth of that income came from just two customers, and the filing expects a limited customer base to keep generating a significant share of total revenue for the foreseeable future. In a communication to prospective investors in mid-October, the company put third-quarter revenue at $16.8bn, up 45% from the previous quarter.

First half 20251.1

First half 202616.3

First half 2025

1.1 $bn

First half 2026

16.3 $bn

Data from the article text

Compute spending and cloud commitments

Anthropic invested nearly $9bn in computing capacity and infrastructure in the first half of 2026, more than the $7.3bn it spent on infrastructure across all of 2025. The draft filing says the company has committed to cloud computing contracts worth about $450bn over the next decade, including $111bn with Google Cloud, $110bn with Amazon Web Services and $31bn with Microsoft. The Wall Street Journal report also says the company could spend $750bn on additional computing capacity in the coming years. According to the leaked filing as TechCrunch describes it, Anthropic is struggling to secure enough capacity from AWS, Google and Microsoft, which increasingly view it as a competitor rather than a customer.

Google Cloud111

Amazon Web Services110

Microsoft31

Google Cloud

111 $bn

Amazon Web Services

110 $bn

Microsoft

31 $bn

Data from the article text

Risks flagged in the filing

The filing warns that Anthropic could be held liable for damages caused by harmful AI behaviour, and that such damages could exceed its available insurance coverage. It also builds on catastrophic risk disclosures the company had made earlier. Anthropic leases some of its own data centers and works with third-party data center operators, which the company worries have a limited operating history and could be less reliable than the large cloud providers.

Timing of the listing

Anthropic is preparing an initial public offering, and the filing is expected to be made public before a listing that is reportedly targeted for November. EL PAÍS reports that the company aims for a valuation of $2 trillion, which would make the float the largest stock market offering in history, ahead of the June debut of its rival SpaceX. Handelsblatt notes that the company could seek one of the largest listings ever on Wall Street, with proceeds meant to fund chips, data centers and staff.