The Anthropic Filing Cheat Sheet

01 Split the loss in two

Anthropic lost $80.7 billion in the first half of 2026, according to its draft IPO filing, the paperwork a company writes before it sells shares to the public. The Wall Street Journal and Reuters both reported it on October 20, 2026. A year earlier, the same six months cost it $13 billion.

About $72 billion of that loss is not money Anthropic spent. Reuters says it comes from bonds that can later turn into Anthropic shares. Early investors lent Anthropic money and can choose to take shares instead of cash. Anthropic became worth far more, so the shares it owes them cost more, and the accounting rules count that rise as a loss.

Think of it as a balloon tied to the company. The higher Anthropic rises, the bigger the balloon gets.

Part of the loss H1 2026 What it is

Promised in shares About $72 billion The rising value of bonds that can turn into shares. No cash left the bank

Everything else About $9 billion The reports don't say how much is the day-to-day business

Not harmless. For all of 2025 this paper loss was $34 billion. Those bonds can turn into real shares, so anyone who buys at the IPO shares the company with those early lenders. It works in reverse too: if Anthropic's value fell, this part could shrink.

02 The cash that leaves

Computing power here means the giant data centers that run Claude. Anthropic rents most of them from three cloud companies, and most of what it has signed can't be cancelled.

Line Number Source

Google About $111 billion WSJ

Amazon About $110 billion WSJ

Microsoft $31 billion WSJ

All cloud deals, next 7 to 10 years Around $450 billion WSJ

With chips, data centers and about $150 billion still in talks Up to $750 billion The filing

Spread over ten years, the cloud deals alone come to more than $100 million a day. By July, Reuters reported, Anthropic was bringing in about $65 billion a year. Cash spent on computing was nearly $9 billion in the first half of 2026, up from $2.3 billion a year earlier. Over the same year, revenue grew about 15 times and the computing bill about 4 times.

03 What the price assumes

The valuation is simply what investors agree the whole company is worth. Anthropic wants up to $2 trillion. Some of the investors it needs now argue for $1.5 trillion.

The quarter that started it. On October 14, 2026, Anthropic said it made $16.8 billion in three months, Reuters reported: up 45 percent. The quarter before, sales had more than doubled. Still fast, but slower. The skeptic's math. New Constructs says that to deserve $2 trillion, revenue would have to grow more than tenfold in 2026, double in 2027, then grow more than 50 percent a year until 2035. Its most pessimistic case: $144 billion. "Adjusted" profit. Anthropic told investors it was profitable in the summer quarter on an adjusted basis. Adjusted means the company picks which costs to leave out. It's not the official number.

04 The three lines to read first

When the full filing goes public, read these three before the headline number.

The paper loss next to the valuation. The loss from early loans that turn into shares. If Anthropic's price goes up, that paper loss goes up with it.

Cash spent on computing next to revenue. That's the gap that has to close. Over the last year revenue grew faster than the computing bill.

The share from the two biggest customers. In the first half of 2026 it was about a fifth, and the filing doesn't name them.

My filing read

Company: [NAME] Period: [MONTHS]
Net loss: [$]
Promised in shares (bonds, notes, fair value): [$]
Paid in cash (what's left): [$]
Valuation asked: [$]
Cash spent on computing: [$] Revenue: [$]
Gap closing? [YES / NO]
Share of revenue from the top two customers: [%]
Is the profit "adjusted"? [YES / NO] What's left out: [LIST]

Sources

Reuters via US News: Anthropic logged net loss of over $80 billion in first half of 2026, WSJ reports Investing.com: Anthropic revenue hits $16.3 billion as preliminary S-1 outlines IPO risks (WSJ) TradingKey: Anthropic IPO prospectus, first-half loss hits $80.7 billion CNA (Reuters): Anthropic logged net loss of over $80 billion in first half of 2026 Yahoo Finance (Reuters): Some Anthropic investors now see a $1.5 trillion IPO BusinessDay (Reuters): Anthropic revenue jumps 45% to $16.8bn The Next Web: New Constructs calls Anthropic the most ridiculous IPO of 2026 TechCrunch: Anthropic's cloud partnerships are getting messy

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