Anthropic lost more than $80 billion in the first half of 2026 while its revenue rose to $16.3 billion, according to a draft of its IPO prospectus seen by The Wall Street Journal. Most of the loss is an accounting charge, not cash spent. The numbers arrive days before Anthropic is expected to make its S-1 public, which Yahoo Finance reports could happen as soon as Friday.
Anthropic did not comment on the report, and Reuters said the figures could not be immediately verified. Every number below comes from that reporting, not from a public filing.
What the leaked S-1 shows
According to the Journal, as summarized by Fortune and Al Jazeera and Reuters:
- Revenue: $16.3 billion in the six months that ended June 30, up from $1.1 billion a year earlier. Fortune adds that the draft puts full-year 2025 revenue at $4.6 billion.
- Compute and infrastructure: about $9 billion in the first half, up from $2.3 billion a year earlier.
- Net loss: more than $80 billion, up from $13 billion a year earlier.
- Future compute: the Journal reported that Anthropic could spend up to $750 billion on computing capacity in the coming years, including deals still under discussion. Fortune says the company has signed $450 billion of mostly "noncancellable" deals with cloud providers.
- Executive pay: CEO Dario Amodei and President Daniela Amodei each received a base salary of $655,000 in 2025, per Fortune. Most of their pay is stock. Fortune puts his total 2025 compensation at $18 million and hers at $16.5 million.
Why the loss is so large
The headline loss is mostly a paper item. According to the Journal, $72 billion of it came from accounting charges tied to changes in the value of convertible notes and other financial instruments that Anthropic issued to raise money. When a company's valuation climbs fast, instruments that convert into its shares are marked up, and that markup shows up as a loss on the income statement even though no cash leaves the company.
That matters for reading the number. The cash costs of running Claude are better seen in the compute line, which nearly quadrupled to about $9 billion, while revenue grew roughly fifteenfold. Revenue growth outpaced compute growth over that period, by the Journal's figures.
There is a second data point from outside the S-1. Yahoo Finance, citing the Financial Times, reports that Anthropic told investors last week that third-quarter revenue reached $16.8 billion, up from $11.5 billion in the second quarter, and that the company is profitable on an adjusted basis. "Adjusted" measures leave out items such as the instrument charges above, so they are not comparable with the net loss.
For context, Reuters reported in September that Anthropic's 2025 net loss was $42 billion, also from prospectus material.
The risks Anthropic lists
The draft includes a list of risk factors. Per Reuters, they cover uncertainty over how to stop Anthropic's products from causing harm, including through sophisticated cyberattacks or blackmail by models that are not under control. Fortune adds that the draft names a limited customer base as a risk.
Those warnings line up with Anthropic's own research. Last week its red team said small AI models may soon be able to self-replicate on everyday home devices. Putting this kind of risk in a securities filing is different, though: risk factors are legal disclosures to investors, and companies tend to list anything that could hurt the business.
IPO timeline and valuation
Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft registration statement to the SEC in June, Yahoo Finance reports. Three people familiar with its plans told Yahoo the public S-1 could be filed as soon as Friday. Under SEC rules, a company that files confidentially must make its registration materials public 15 calendar days before its formal investor roadshow starts, so a public filing would clear the way for a possible November listing. Yahoo says timing still depends on market conditions.
The valuation is less settled:
- Reuters previously reported that Wall Street expects Anthropic could raise as much as $100 billion at a $2 trillion valuation, per Yahoo.
- After the latest disclosures, some current and prospective investors who attended Anthropic's investor day in San Francisco last week discussed a valuation of around $1.5 trillion, three people told Reuters.
- Yahoo says the offering is expected to be larger than SpaceX's June IPO.
Why it matters
A public S-1 would be the first audited, official look at the economics of a frontier AI lab. Until now, outsiders have relied on leaks and investor-day accounts like the ones above. Three things to check when the real filing appears:
- The size of the instrument charges. If $72 billion of an $80 billion loss is accounting, the underlying business looks very different from the headline.
- The compute commitments. $450 billion in mostly noncancellable cloud deals, per Fortune, is a fixed obligation that has to be paid whether or not revenue keeps growing. Anthropic is already renting GPU capacity from SpaceX's Colossus 1 and working with Google and Amazon, Yahoo reports, and it has added sites such as its first Canadian data centre lease in Nova Scotia.
- Governance. Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation whose Long-Term Benefit Trust can appoint a majority of its board. Physicist Christopher Stubbs joined the Trust this week, and the company has committed, subject to stockholder approval, to set aside shares for its Public Benefit Fund. How the S-1 describes these controls will matter to public investors.
This post reports leaked figures. It is not investment advice.
Sources
- Al Jazeera and Reuters: Anthropic posts $80bn loss in first half of 2026: WSJ
- Fortune: Anthropic's S-1 leaks (again), here's a look at the income statement
- Yahoo Finance: Anthropic to publicly file for IPO as early as Friday, sources say
- Anthropic: Physicist Christopher Stubbs joins Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust
