A stack of thick bound drafts, their page edges flagged with red, blue, green and yellow tabs, lie stacked beside a pen on a long wooden table lined with empty black leather chairs, under tall windows.

The Offering

Anthropic’s Draft Shows an $80.7 Billion Loss, Mostly Non-Cash

Anthropic’s draft prospectus shows $16.3 billion of first-half revenue and an $80.7 billion net loss, $72 billion of it a non-cash charge, The Wall Street Journal reported.

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 21 — Anthropic posted a net loss of $80.7 billion in the first half of this year, according to a draft of the prospectus for its initial public offering that The Wall Street Journal and Reuters each say they have reviewed. About $72 billion of it was an accounting charge reflecting a rise in the estimated value of bonds that could convert into Anthropic shares, rather than cash spent running the business, Reuters reported. The ChargeThe charge records a higher estimated value for the bonds and uses no cash. Of the bonds behind a similar charge in 2025, Reuters reported that as Anthropic’s valuation climbed, their estimated fair value tripled year over year.

The same draft shows how fast the business is growing. Revenue was about $16.3 billion in the six months to June 30, against about $1.1 billion a year earlier, the Journal reported.

That matches the sum of the first- and second-quarter revenue, $4.7 billion and $11.6 billion, that two people who attended an Oct. 14 investor day gave Reuters. Reuters reported that some investors were disappointed that quarterly revenue growth slowed to 45 percent in the third quarter, after revenue more than doubled in the second, and were considering a lower valuation of around $1.5 trillion. Anthropic is expected to go public in November; the Journal said a listing could value the company at up to $2 trillion.

The debate among prospective investors, investingLive wrote in its account of the Journal’s report, is likely to center on “whether revenue growth can keep outrunning compute costs.” Anthropic spent nearly $9 billion on computing capacity and infrastructure in the half, against about $2.3 billion a year earlier, both the Journal and Reuters reported. That is more than the roughly $7.3 billion it spent in all of 2025, the Journal noted.

The loss a year earlier was $13 billion, according to Reuters. Most of Anthropic’s $42 billion net loss for 2025 came from a similar charge, Reuters reported in September; excluding it, the company had an operating loss of about $8.1 billion on $4.6 billion of revenue. Setting the $72 billion aside leaves roughly $8.7 billion of first-half loss, a figure that is not the same as an operating result. At the Oct. 14 investor day, Anthropic said it was profitable on an adjusted basis in the third quarter, the two attendees told Reuters; the figures reported from the draft run only to June 30.

The Bill

By the Journal’s count, Anthropic has committed more than $600 billion to computing.ScaleAt the third quarter’s pace of $16.8 billion, or about $67 billion a year, $600 billion is nearly nine years of revenue. About $450 billion is owed under cloud agreements over the next seven to 10 years, most of which cannot be canceled, according to investingLive’s account, including about $111 billion with Google Cloud, $110 billion with Amazon Web Services and $31 billion with Microsoft, plus up to $86 billion for Nvidia chip capacity from Nscale and Lambda. A separate obligation of more than $160 billion to lease Google chips through Broadcom lifts the total above $600 billion, and deals still under negotiation could add up to $150 billion more.AVGONasdaq326.08▼18.92−5.5%Broadcom · Friday’s session

Reuters gives a different total: at least $518 billion over a decade on cloud services, computing and infrastructure. The two outlets describe the obligations differently, and until the document is public the totals cannot be reconciled.

Despite those commitments, according to investingLive, the company said in the draft that its major cloud partners had not provided as much capacity as it sought, and that those partners increasingly view it as a competitor. It is supplementing that capacity with leased data centers and third-party operators, some of which, it said, have short track records.

Its revenue is concentrated, too. Two customers supplied about a fifth of first-half revenue, the Journal reported, and Anthropic expects a small group of clients to keep supplying a large share. The reports did not name them.

Risk factors take up roughly a third of the document, the Journal reported. They include the possibility of misaligned AI models causing harm, liability for damages such as data theft, and incidents severe enough that insurance may not cover them. Anthropic also cited increasingly coordinated political opposition to building data centers, noting that its public profile could draw attention to projects linked to it, according to investingLive.

The Calendar

No public prospectus had appeared on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR system by early Wednesday, and IFR has reported that Anthropic plans to file one on Oct. 26. IFR, citing a person familiar with the process, said on Oct. 15 that the company planned to launch its public roadshow on Nov. 9 and price the offering the following week. Until then, the figures are a draft that two news organizations have described, not a document investors can read. Anthropic declined to comment on the Journal’s report, investingLive said, and did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Anthropic also faces a judge on Wednesday. At 10 a.m. Pacific, Judge Eumi K. Lee of the Federal District Court in San Jose is scheduled to hear cross-motions for summary judgment in Concord Music Group v. Anthropic, in which music publishers accuse the company of copying the lyrics of 499 songs in training Claude and in its outputs. The publishers ask her to rule that the copying is not fair use; Anthropic asks for judgment on every claim, arguing that training on the lyrics is “transformative” fair use and that direct liability for copying in Claude’s outputs lies with the person who prompted it.

Daily Cortex is written with AI models, including Anthropic’s Claude, and fact-checked with OpenAI’s GPT models.

Sources

  1. Reuters (via The Edge Malaysia), “Anthropic logs first-half net loss of over US$80 bil as AI race weighs,” Oct. 21, 2026.
  2. Investing.com (reporting The Wall Street Journal), “Anthropic revenue hits $16.3 billion as preliminary S-1 outlines IPO risks - WSJ,” Oct. 20, 2026.
  3. investingLive (reporting The Wall Street Journal), “Anthropic IPO draft shows nearly 15-fold revenue jump and $600 billion in compute deals,” Oct. 20, 2026.
  4. Reuters (via Investing.com), “At Anthropic pre-IPO meet: ‘Thinking’ caps, surging revenue, no human extinction,” Oct. 14, 2026.
  5. IFR, “Anthropic pushes ahead with mid-November IPO,” Oct. 15, 2026.
  6. SEC EDGAR, “Full-text search for registration statements on Form S-1 naming “Anthropic,” Oct. 14–21,” Checked Oct. 21, 2026.
  7. U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (via CourtListener), “Docket, Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC, No. 5:24-cv-03811-EKL,” Checked Oct. 21, 2026.
  8. U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, “Plaintiffs’ Notice of Motion and Motion for Partial Summary Judgment (ECF 594),” Mar. 23, 2026.
  9. U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, “Anthropic’s Notice of Motion and Motion for Summary Judgment (ECF 693),” Apr. 22, 2026.
  10. U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, “Anthropic’s Supplemental Brief Regarding Doe 1 v. GitHub, Inc. (ECF 911),” Oct. 16, 2026.