Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco in 2023 (file photo). Image: TechCrunch / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0, cropped
Anthropic brought in $16.3 billion in the first six months of 2026, almost 15 times as much as a year earlier, and recorded a net loss of $80.7 billion along the way, according to a new draft of its IPO prospectus seen by The Wall Street Journal. The filing isn’t public yet: Anthropic has submitted its S-1 to the US Securities and Exchange Commission confidentially, so none of the figures can be checked against the document itself, and they may change before it is published.
The Journal’s report, by Anissa Gardizy, is the first look at Anthropic’s numbers for 2026 from the prospectus. The earlier version of the filing covered only 2024 and 2025.
Revenue up almost 15-fold
The $16.3 billion compares with $1.1 billion in the first half of 2025, according to the Journal. That fits what Anthropic has already told investors: just under $5 billion in the first quarter and about $11.5 billion in the second. Growth has since slowed, but Anthropic told IPO investors last week it made $16.8 billion in the third quarter alone, more than in the whole first half.
For a sense of scale, Anthropic’s revenue for all of 2025 was about $4.6 billion.
Why the loss is so big
Most of the $80.7 billion loss isn’t money that left the company. About $72 billion of it comes from accounting charges tied to changes in the value of convertible notes and other instruments Anthropic sold to raise money, Reuters reported, citing the Journal. Notes that can turn into shares become a bigger liability on paper as the company’s valuation climbs, and that increase is booked as a loss.
Take those charges out and the loss is about $8.7 billion for the half, on our own sum from the reported figures. That is still a lot of money, but a far smaller number than the headline. Anthropic lost $13 billion in the first half of 2025, according to the Journal, and about $42 billion for the full year.
The figures are under US accounting rules (GAAP). Anthropic has told investors it was profitable on its own adjusted measure in the second and third quarters, which strips out costs such as these charges.
A $450 billion computing bill
The other big number is computing. Anthropic spent about $9 billion on computing capacity and infrastructure in the first six months of 2026, against $7.3 billion in all of 2025, according to the draft. It has signed roughly $450 billion of cloud computing agreements running over the next decade, including about $111 billion with Google Cloud, $110 billion with Amazon Web Services and $31 billion with Microsoft.
The company says it could spend up to $750 billion on computing in the coming years once deals still being negotiated are included. The filing also says Anthropic asked for more capacity than the big cloud providers were willing to supply, which is why it is turning to third-party data centre developers as well. The listing, which could value Anthropic at about $2 trillion, is meant to help pay for all this.
Two customers, a fifth of sales
Anthropic still depends heavily on a handful of buyers. About 20% of its first-half revenue came from two customers, according to the Journal, which doesn’t name them. In 2025 the figure was nearly a quarter.
The risk factors also go further than usual for a software company. They flag problems with model alignment and the chance of catastrophic incidents, and warn that damages from a serious AI-related security event could exceed Anthropic’s insurance cover.
Anthropic didn’t respond to Reuters’ request for comment. The public S-1 is expected before a listing that has been pencilled in for November.
Why it matters
These are the first 2026 numbers from Anthropic’s own filing, and they show a company growing at an extraordinary pace while its paper losses and computing promises grow faster still. Investors deciding whether to buy in at a $2 trillion valuation will have to judge which of those numbers matters more, a question at the heart of our AI bubble checklist.
Sources: The Wall Street Journal; Reuters.
Latest Anthropic news
