Anthropic's draft S-1 filing, as reviewed by The Wall Street Journal ahead of a planned November IPO, reveals a headline net loss of $80.7 billion for the first half of 2026 — a dramatic widening from the $13 billion loss recorded in the same period a year earlier — but the truly striking detail is buried deeper in the prospectus. The company has locked itself into approximately $450 billion in mostly non-cancelable cloud agreements over the next seven to 10 years, split among Alphabet's (GOOG) (GOOGL) Google Cloud at $111 billion, Amazon (AMZN) Web Services at $110 billion, and Microsoft (MSFT) at $31 billion.
Additional commitments of up to $86 billion for Nvidia (NVDA) chips through neoclouds and over $160 billion for Broadcom (AVGO)-facilitated Google chips push total future infrastructure obligations past $600 billion, with deals under negotiation that could lift the figure toward $750 billion — a sum that would rival the GDP of Switzerland.
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The $72 Billion Non-Cash Charge Behind the Headline Loss
The $80.7 billion headline loss, which dwarfs the combined first-half losses of every money-losing company in the S&P 500 Index ($SPX), requires careful disaggregation: approximately $72 billion of that figure is a non-cash accounting charge reflecting the rising fair value of convertible notes and other financing instruments issued during prior fundraising rounds, rather than an outflow of operating cash.
Stripping out that charge, Anthropic's remaining net loss was roughly $8.7 billion for the half — still substantial, but a fundamentally different story than the headline suggests.
Revenue Surged Fifteenfold, but Costs Surged Faster
Revenue at Anthropic hit $16.3 billion in the first six months of 2026, roughly 15 times the $1.1 billion generated a year earlier and already far exceeding full-year 2025 revenue of $4.6 billion. The company indicated that third-quarter revenue climbed a further 45% sequentially to $16.8 billion, and management told prospective investors it achieved profitability on an adjusted basis during that quarter.
Computing and infrastructure spending, however, reached nearly $9 billion in just the first half — almost four times the $2.3 billion spent in the year-ago period and already surpassing the $7.3 billion spent in all of 2025.
Concentration Risk and AI-Specific Dangers
Roughly one-fifth of first-half revenue came from just two customers, which is a dependency Anthropic expects to persist. That’s a concentration ratio that would raise eyebrows even in enterprise software, let alone for a company seeking a trillion-dollar-plus valuation.
The draft prospectus also devotes extensive space to AI-specific risk factors, including the possibility of models exhibiting self-preserving behavior, generating responses resembling blackmail, or enabling cyberattacks, with potential liabilities that could exceed available insurance.
Valuation Already Slipping Before Marketing Begins
Some investors who attended an October 14 investor day are now discussing a valuation of around $1.5 trillion, a meaningful step down from the roughly $2 trillion target floated earlier, as slowing sequential growth rates and the sheer magnitude of long-term capital commitments temper enthusiasm.
The reception of the Anthropic IPO — expected to begin marketing as early as mid-November — will serve as a critical barometer for the broader AI investment thesis heading into 2027, and for whether the hyperscaler capex cycle that has enriched Nvidia and Broadcom shareholders can sustain yet another massive claimant on cloud capacity.
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On the date of publication, Sarah Holzmann did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. For more information please view the Barchart Disclosure Policy here.
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