Anthropic posts $80bn loss in first half of 2026: WSJ

The loss is up $13 billion more than last year, driven by accounting charges, the report said.

Anthropic, the artificial intelligence (AI) company known for creating the chatbot Claude, recorded a net loss of more than $80bn in the first half of 2026, according to the Wall Street Journal, as the market anticipates its looming initial public offering (IPO).

The corporation also indicated it could spend up to $750bn in coming years to acquire more computing capacity, including potential deals currently under discussion, the Journal said on Tuesday.

The main driver for the loss was the $72bn in accounting charges related to changes in the value of convertible notes and other financial instruments Anthropic issued to raise funding, the report said.

The loss figure was up from $13bn a year earlier, according to a draft prospectus, a legal document corporations submit to financial regulators, for its IPO.

The figures show the hefty costs of the AI race, even as investors look more closely at whether the money companies are pouring into chips and data centres will pay off.

Anthropic also shared a list of potential risk factors, including uncertainty over how to prevent its products from doing harm, whether through sophisticated cyberattacks or blackmail by uncontrolled models.

Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment, and the report on the non-public information could not be immediately verified.

Investors weigh loss

Reuters first reported in September that Anthropic posted a net loss of $42bn in 2025, as part of a series of exclusives from its IPO prospectus.

The company has benefited from the popularity of Claude Code, its coding assistant that developers use to write software and build apps.

But some current and prospective investors who attended Anthropic’s investor day in San Francisco, California, last week are weighing a lower valuation for the AI company after its latest financial disclosures, four people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The investors who attended the event discussed a valuation of around $1.5 trillion, three of the people said, a significant step down from the roughly $2 trillion valuation previously expected for the November share sale.

Anthropic’s revenue jumped to $16.3bn in the six-month period that ended June 30, up from $1.1bn a year ago, while AI infrastructure spending nearly quadrupled to almost $9bn, the Journal reported.

Anthropic reported last week that AI could be months away from learning to self-replicate on everyday home devices.