YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Anthropic logged net loss of over $80B in first half of 2026

48 points throwa356262 1 hour ago 18 comments

throwa356262 1 hour ago | parent

"Anthropic's third-quarter revenue rose 45% to $16.8 billion"

This is great for Anthropic, but who is increasing their AI spending in this climate?

shakna 1 hour ago | parent

The corporate partners, who are also often investors, and have an interest in ensuring the world sees genAI as utterly required.

Microsoft, SK Group, Meta, Google, Oracle, etc.

throwa356262 51 minutes ago | parent

I dont know, with the exception of SK, all these companies have announced reduced AI budgets and/or move to own inference.

luke5441 20 minutes ago | parent

Maybe they did it like SpaceX and sold their compute to a competitor and are booking that as sales.

skrtskrt 5 minutes ago | parent

Wasn't their previous revenue increase more than twice as big?

That would very much not be great for Anthropic, they need to be accelerating growth to keep valuation, doubly so as interest rates on corporate bonds continue to rise.

xvxvx 1 hour ago | parent

Keep throwing money into the wishing well. This has been, since day one, either a gamble or a complete con, depending on how in touch with reality you are.

arcwhite 54 minutes ago | parent

It can be two things!

saidnooneever 46 minutes ago | parent

if the gamble is also con, it collapses to being just a con

saidnooneever 47 minutes ago | parent

just use xhigh setting to support them through this AI winter brrrrr.

they are obviously a con ( opinion). look at last slop report. opus 5.5 gets _worse_ when u put higher attention settings. u get banned for using better harnesses etc. etc.

they could do really well. a lot of avid supporters. But i think if they do not change their tactics then openAI, GLM for those who can run it, or others, might start taking even those (pardon my french) religious fans.

0cf8612b2e1e 1 hour ago | parent

  Reuters  reported first in September that Anthropic posted a net loss of $42 billion in 2025  and plans to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing  and  infrastructure obligations in coming years.
$16B revenue and hoping to spend $500B in the coming years.

kolinko 43 minutes ago | parent

Its revenue grew 12-fold year to year, and 50% just last quarter. Last quarter it reached profitability if you exclude convertibles etc. And if you won’t it is still well on track to be profitable this/next year.

It is actually faring much better than other tech startups ipo’ing over the last 20 years.

MisterMunchkin 19 minutes ago | parent

It reached profitability if you exclude all costs (so it isn’t profitable lmao)

sigmar 38 minutes ago | parent

Why leave out the time scales? 16.8B revenue for Q3 of 2026 and planning to spend 518B over 10 years (which would average to 13B quarterly)

ostracoda 1 hour ago | parent

lol

psygn89 36 minutes ago | parent

I think todays latest models would satisfy most users, so it makes me wonder how soon until we can run it on our machines without having to subscribe and with China handing us freebies? I think they have dug well past the point of profitable returns before that happens, so I can see why big tech companies are scrambling to get into bed with US government more than ever as a backup plan when/if their big gamble fails. And now our corrupt government and its 3 letter agencies, they have bargaining power to use this tech and relax privacy efforts and add more backdoors for "safety and security" whereas in the past it was easier for these companies to say no. A match made in hell that we are all roped into now.

dctwin 23 minutes ago | parent

Important to note that $72bn of that loss is some accounting thing and not really relevant wrt. the solvency of Anthropic

aurareturn 7 minutes ago | parent

Probably stocks based compensation or something like that.