Anthropic Lost $80 Billion, but Mostly on Paper

Anthropic’s IPO paperwork is doing what IPO paperwork always does: ripping the cover off the machine. The company says it lost $80.7 billion in the first half of the year, even as revenue jumped to $16.3 billion from $1.1 billion a year earlier. On paper, that sounds catastrophic. In practice, most of the red ink isn’t cash leaving the building.

About $72 billion of the loss comes from revaluing convertible notes and other financing instruments. As Anthropic’s valuation rises, so does the value of those instruments, and the accounting rules force the company to record that as a loss. The money that actually went out the door was mostly for computing power and infrastructure, which came to nearly $9 billion in the first half. That was more than the $7.3 billion spent in all of 2025.

The prospectus also shows just how aggressively Anthropic is locking up capacity. It has signed noncancelable cloud contracts worth about $450 billion over the next decade, including $111 billion with Google Cloud, $110 billion with Amazon Web Services and $31 billion with Microsoft. With ongoing negotiations, the total could climb to as much as $750 billion. Anthropic says it needed more capacity than the major cloud providers could supply, which is why it is also leasing the Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 data centers in Memphis from Elon Musk’s SpaceX for as much as $84.5 billion, according to Reuters.

For investors, the company is telling a much prettier story. It says third-quarter revenue reached $16.8 billion and adjusted operating margin was above 11 percent, which would make this the second straight quarter of adjusted profitability. But that metric leaves out training costs for new models and stock-based compensation, two of the ugliest lines in any A.I. budget. The prospectus also flags customer concentration, huge fixed compute costs and the risk that a major safety incident could blow past insurance coverage.

And the race to the public markets is getting crowded. OpenAI has also filed confidentially for an I.P.O. and was most recently aiming for a valuation around $1 trillion. Anthropic, meanwhile, is said to be targeting up to $2 trillion in its planned offering in the coming weeks. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei each took a base salary of about $655,000 in 2025 and have pledged to give away 80 percent of their stakes, while Anthropic plans to place 5 percent of its shares into a public benefit fund.