Anthropic posts $80.7bn loss ahead of IPO as computing costs soar

Anthropic, developer of the artificial intelligence model Claude, reported a net loss of $80.7 billion for the first six months of 2026 ending 30 June.

According to a report by The Wall Street Journal citing the company’s draft initial public offering prospectus, this recorded loss nearly doubled the $42 billion loss incurred across the entirety of 2025.

The vast majority of that enormous figure, accounting for $72 billion, stemmed from accounting-driven book-value write-downs.

In contrast, the company saw a sharp surge in revenue, with turnover in the first half of the year climbing to $16.3 billion from $1.1 billion in the same period of the prior year.

During this period, Anthropic spent approximately $9 billion on computing power and infrastructure needs, surpassing in just six months the $7.3 billion spent across the whole of 2025.

The company has commitments to pay roughly $450 billion over the next seven to 10 years under cloud service contracts.

Under these obligations, contracts are planned for $111 billion with Google Cloud, $110 billion with Amazon Web Services, and $31 billion with Microsoft.

Anthropic will also spend up to $86 billion by 2033 and 2034, respectively, to lease Nvidia chips through smaller AI-focused cloud providers Nscale and Lambda.

The company could spend an additional $750 billion in the coming years to expand its computing capacity.

Roughly a third of the draft IPO prospectus was dedicated directly to risk factors.

The document highlighted the possibility that models could cause tangible real-world harm, noting that artificial intelligence could exhibit a “self-preservation” tendency and produce responses resembling “blackmail”.

Anthropic warned that the scale of damage caused by an AI-driven “catastrophic event” could render insuring against such risks impossible.

According to market expectations, Anthropic’s IPO could rank among the largest transactions in history, potentially surpassing SpaceX’s record.

Following the market debut, the company’s market valuation is projected to reach up to $2 trillion.