Anthropic's IPO draft shows an $80.7 billion loss, most of it an accounting charge

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, lost $80.7 billion in the first six months of 2026, according to a draft of its IPO prospectus reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and reported by Reuters. About $72 billion of that was an accounting charge tied to the convertible bonds Anthropic used to raise money (loans that can be repaid in stock instead of cash), not cash going out the door. Strip it out and the half-year loss comes to roughly $8.7 billion.

According to the same draft, revenue over those six months reached $16.3 billion, up from $1.1 billion a year earlier. The draft was filed confidentially and is not yet available in the public filings of the SEC, the US securities regulator. Anthropic has not commented on the figures. Investors expect the shares to start trading in November.

Why most of the loss is on paper

A convertible bond is a loan with a twist. The lender can later choose to be repaid in company stock instead of cash. Accounting rules require Anthropic to carry those bonds at their current fair value, so when the stock they convert into becomes more valuable, the bonds are worth more and the liability on the books grows. That increase is booked as a loss even though Anthropic hasn't paid anyone a dollar.

Anthropic's stock has climbed fast. Iconiq invested in 2025 at a $183 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported, according to Investing.com. By the May 2026 funding round, the company was valued at $965 billion, more than five times as much. Reuters says the $72 billion charge reflects the higher estimated value of the convertible bonds. The same thing happened in 2025, when Anthropic posted a $42 billion net loss driven mostly by a similar charge. Excluding that charge, Anthropic lost about $8.1 billion running its business, on $4.6 billion in revenue.

A charge that costs no cash still costs something. When those bonds convert, their holders will own a slice of Anthropic worth far more than what they lent, and every other shareholder's slice gets smaller.

Revenue is soaring, and two customers matter a lot

Reuters credits much of the growth to Claude Code, Anthropic's coding assistant. The pace is easing, though. Second-quarter revenue hit $11.6 billion, more than double the roughly $4.7 billion of the first quarter, and the third quarter reached $16.8 billion, up 45%, according to people who attended an October 14 investor meeting. That third-quarter figure does not come from the draft, which only runs through June.

Two customers accounted for about a fifth of first-half revenue, according to the draft as summarized by investingLive. The document doesn't name them and warns that a significant share of revenue will keep coming from a small number of customers.

A $600 billion bill for computing power

Compute is the processing capacity Anthropic rents in data centers to train its models and answer every request sent to Claude. In the first half, it spent nearly $9 billion on it, up from $2.3 billion a year earlier. That is more than half of what it brought in.

Its future commitments dwarf that. Anthropic has signed roughly $450 billion in cloud contracts running seven to ten years, most of them noncancelable, according to investingLive's summary of the draft. They include about $111 billion with Google, $110 billion with Amazon Web Services, $31 billion with Microsoft, and up to $86 billion for Nvidia chips through Nscale and Lambda. A separate deal worth more than $160 billion to lease Google chips through Broadcom pushes the total past $600 billion. Contracts still under negotiation could add another $150 billion.

Much of that money is owed whether or not Anthropic uses all the capacity, Dealroom notes. The draft also says Amazon, Google and Microsoft increasingly see Anthropic as a competitor and haven't been willing to supply all the capacity it needs, according to the Journal's findings as summarized on Yahoo Finance. That helps explain why Anthropic keeps adding suppliers, including AMD, which agreed in July to provide up to two gigawatts of chips.

What it means if you use Claude

Nothing changes in the app for now. Neither the draft nor Anthropic mentions new plans or prices for Claude. What the prospectus does reveal is the constraint behind the service. Anthropic needs so much computing capacity that it is committing hundreds of billions of dollars to it, and the big cloud providers still won't supply all it asks for. That capacity determines how many requests Claude can handle at once.

Going public mainly changes who Anthropic answers to. A listed company reports results every quarter and answers to thousands of shareholders who expect a return. Anthropic is taking that step days after pledging 5% of its shares to a public benefit fund.

Those shareholders also get a list of the company's risks, and nearly a third of the draft is devoted to them, including test cases in which its models showed self-preserving or manipulative behavior, such as blackmail to avoid being shut down, and potential legal liability for harm they cause.

When the IPO could happen and what we don't know

Anthropic hasn't set a date. In early October, Bloomberg reported that the company planned an investor roadshow, the round of meetings where it pitches its shares to buyers, the week of November 9 and a first trading day on November 26, a schedule that could still change, according to Herald Business. On October 22, Bloomberg added that Anthropic is preparing to file its prospectus publicly in the coming days. SEC rules require that filing to be public at least 15 days before the roadshow begins, so keeping the November 9 week would mean publishing it by about October 25.

The share price, the number of shares on offer, how much Anthropic wants to raise and which exchange it will list on are all still unknown. So is the valuation. Some reports floated as much as $2 trillion, but some investors who attended the October 14 meeting were discussing something closer to $1.5 trillion, Reuters reported. The numbers in the draft could also change in the public version.

Early backers stand to gain the most, according to Bloomberg. Spark Capital and Sound Ventures invested in 2023, when Anthropic was valued at $5 billion, nearly 200 times less than in May. Iconiq has put in more than $6 billion, and its stake is now worth about $17 billion at the May valuation. Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC and Sequoia Capital each own roughly 1%.