A draft of Anthropic’s listing papers shows an $80.7 billion half-year loss. Most of it is an accounting entry

The Wall Street Journal reported on 20 October that a draft of Anthropic’s listing papers shows a net loss of $80.7 billion in the first half of 2026, against $13 billion in the same half a year earlier. Of this year’s figure, $72 billion is an accounting charge from a change in the value of convertible notes and other instruments the company has issued. That is not cash that left the building. It is the cost of promises that became more expensive to settle as the company’s value rose. The Journal’s account, as carried by Business Standard, puts the cash spent on computing and infrastructure at close to $9 billion in the six months to 30 June, against $2.3 billion a year earlier, and at $7.3 billion for all of 2025. Anthropic has not published the draft.

The contracts are the larger number, and they are not the same as the loss. The draft, as reported, shows agreements for computing power of about $450 billion over the next seven to ten years, and says most of them cannot be cancelled. Of that, about $111 billion is with Google Cloud, $110 billion with Amazon Web Services and $31 billion with Microsoft. A separate line, worded as what the company may spend rather than what it has signed, puts further computing in the coming years at $750 billion. Those two figures should not be added. One is a set of contracts already described. The other is a possibility in the same report.

The loss is not the bill

A reader who stops at $80.7 billion will think Anthropic spent that on chips. The Journal’s breakdown says most of it is the paper value of instruments that convert into shares. The bill that has to be paid is the computing: $9 billion in a half, already more than the whole of last year, sitting under contracts measured in hundreds of billions that mostly cannot be walked away from. That is a different risk from a loss on a spreadsheet. It is capacity the company has agreed to take, whether the next model earns it back or not.

The same report says Anthropic is set to start marketing the offering as soon as the week of 9 November. That is a timetable from the Journal, not a date Anthropic has announced. This desk has already filed a separate account, from people who were in the room, of a third-quarter sales figure. The draft described here is a first-half document, and the report of it does not restate that quarter. Until the prospectus is public, every number in this story is what one newspaper says a draft contains.