Anthropic's draft IPO filing shows $80.7bn first-half loss, mostly from a $72bn accounting charge

Draft filing shows a $72bn accounting charge

The draft S-1 prospectus for Anthropic's planned IPO, reported by the Wall Street Journal and Reuters on 20 and 21 October 2026, shows a net loss of $80.7bn for the first half of 2026. The same period a year earlier recorded a loss of $13bn. Most of the loss, about $72bn, comes from an accounting adjustment tied to a rise in the value of convertible bonds that can be turned into company shares. Because those bonds are liabilities, the charge is not a cash cost of running the business, according to the reports.

Revenue and customer concentration

Revenue reached $16.3bn in the first half of 2026, compared with $1.1bn a year earlier, and the company generated $4.6bn across all of 2025. About 20% of that half-year revenue came from two customers, and the draft says a significant share of future billing is likely to stay with a limited number of clients. The Journal reported that third-quarter revenue alone reached $16.8bn, a figure Anthropic presented to investors in mid-October. Il Fatto Quotidiano put the quarter's growth at 45% on the previous quarter. That slowdown in growth disappointed some investors ahead of the listing.

Compute spending and cloud commitments

Infrastructure and compute spending came to nearly $9bn in the first half, up from $2.3bn in the same period of 2025 and above the $7.3bn spent in all of 2025. The prospectus lists about $450bn of cloud deals over the next seven to ten years, most of them non-cancellable, including $111bn with Google Cloud, $110bn with Amazon Web Services and $31bn with Microsoft. Reuters reported in September that Anthropic had committed to at least $518bn of spending over a decade, a figure Il Fatto Quotidiano also cites. Axios, citing the Journal, puts future infrastructure costs already above $600bn, and deals under negotiation could add about $150bn. Reuters reported in October that Broadcom has agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42bn for its chips.

Valuation and the November listing

Anthropic is preparing to list in November, and Bloomberg reported that trading could start before Thanksgiving. A separate financial report in mid-October cut the company's valuation to $1.5 trillion. El Periódico reported that the company reached a $965bn valuation in May, and that some investors are now weighing $1.5 trillion against the $2 trillion the company had aimed for. Il Fatto Quotidiano reported an investor day at the company's San Francisco headquarters ahead of the offering.

Risks and the dispute with Washington

The risk factors include a narrow customer base, uncertain access to the computing power the company needs, and models that show "self-preserving" qualities to avoid being switched off, Bloomberg reported. Responses resembling "blackmail" are another flagged risk, and the company warns of political resistance to data centres in the United States, where most of its capacity sits. Il Fatto Quotidiano reports that the investor day covered the approach to security risks, the issue that brought Dario Amodei into conflict first with the Pentagon and then with the White House. That crisis now appears resolved, although the paper expects it to shape long-term relations between the administration and Anthropic.