Anthropic posts a net loss of over $80 billion in six months ahead of its IPO, most of it an accounting charge

Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic has reported a large loss as it prepares to list on the stock market. The company's net loss in the first six months of this year reached 80.7 billion US dollars. Reuters reported the figure after reviewing the draft prospectus prepared for its initial public offering (IPO).

According to documents from the San Francisco-based technology company, its financial loss in the same period last year was 13 billion dollars — meaning the paper loss has multiplied several times over within a year.

The largest part of the loss, however, is not day-to-day operating spending. About 72 billion dollars of the first-half loss is a single accounting charge. Because the estimated market value of bonds that could later convert into Anthropic shares has risen sharply, that amount had to be recorded — even though it is not a direct cash expense.

The company is expected to be able to list on the market this November. After the financial statement emerged, however, some investors are now considering a reduced market valuation for Anthropic of around 1.5 trillion dollars, according to the document review.

The figures come at a time when investors are closely examining whether the huge sums being poured into chips and data centres in the race for AI dominance will deliver the expected profits. The documents state that Anthropic has committed to spending at least 518 billion dollars over the next decade on cloud services, computing and infrastructure.

The spending pressure is clearer still in the infrastructure numbers. In the first six months of this year alone, the company spent about 9 billion dollars on computing capacity and infrastructure — far more than the 2.3 billion dollars of the same period a year earlier.

Revenue, meanwhile, has continued to grow. At a meeting with prospective IPO investors on October 14, Anthropic said its revenue in the third quarter of this year rose 45 percent from the previous quarter to 16.8 billion dollars.

Yet not everyone is reassured by the growth. Many investors expressed disappointment that the pace of growth slowed somewhat on a quarterly basis, because revenue in the second quarter had more than doubled from the first quarter to reach 11.6 billion dollars.

Accounting-driven losses of this kind are not new for Anthropic. Reuters had earlier reported that the same process produced a net loss of 42 billion dollars in 2025. Excluding that charge, the company's actual operating loss in 2025 was about 8.1 billion dollars against revenue of 4.6 billion dollars.

One strength on the revenue side has been its coding assistant service, Claude Code. The service's wide popularity among software and app developers is having a positive effect on Anthropic's income, the report noted.

Analysts say the immediate future of the overall AI market depends on how Anthropic's IPO is received before rival OpenAI comes to the market next year — making this listing a test not just for one company but for the entire sector.

Anthropic declined to comment when contacted by Reuters. Attention now turns to the possible November listing: whether investors look past the enormous paper loss and place their faith in the company's revenue and growth story will be the real verdict.