Anthropic, the San Francisco company behind the Claude chatbot, recorded a first-half 2026 net loss of more than 80 billion dollars, according to the Wall Street Journal, which saw a draft prospectus for a planned initial public offering. Al Jazeera repeated the figures on 21 October. This is not a bankruptcy and not a court ruling.

The net loss rose from 13 billion dollars in the same period of 2025. The main driver, the Journal wrote, is 72 billion dollars in accounting charges tied to changes in the value of convertible notes and other instruments Anthropic issued to raise money. That sum is not cash spent in the half-year on servers or wages.

Revenue for the six months ended 30 June jumped to 16.3 billion dollars, from 1.1 billion a year earlier. Spending on artificial-intelligence infrastructure came close to 9 billion, nearly four times the prior interval, again according to the Journal.

The company indicated it could spend up to 750 billion dollars in coming years on computing capacity, including deals still under discussion. That is a scale of intention, not a bill already paid and not a signed 750-billion-dollar contract.

The draft prospectus, according to the reports, also lists risks: uncertainty about how to stop products from doing harm, including through sophisticated cyberattacks or blackmail by uncontrolled models. Those are risk factors in the document, not incidents confirmed in this story.

Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment. Al Jazeera notes that the information is not public and could not be immediately verified. Channel News Asia, on a Reuters wire, gives the same 80.7 billion dollar loss and the same 72 billion dollar accounting charge, plus nearly 9 billion spent on computing capacity in the half-year.

Reuters reported in September, also from the prospectus, a 42 billion dollar net loss in 2025, again with a large similar accounting charge. Some valuation talk after an investor day, from people familiar with the matter, points to about 1.5 trillion dollars against about 2 trillion previously expected for a November share sale. That is not a closed market price.

The firm has benefited from the popularity of Claude Code, its coding assistant. Until a prospectus is filed in public, the closed fact is the figure in the draft the Journal saw: a first-half 2026 net loss of more than 80 billion dollars, of which 72 billion is accounting on financing instruments, not an insolvency.

Image: UK Prime Minister, Dario Amodei, 24 May 2023, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons; a 2023 portrait, not a photograph of the 2026 offering.

Sources consulted: Anthropic posts $80bn loss in first half of 2026: WSJ - Al Jazeera; Anthropic logged net loss of over $80 billion in first half of 2026, WSJ reports - CNA.