Anthropic's draft IPO filing shows an $80.7 billion loss and a mountain of compute bills

Anthropic is heading toward a planned November stock market debut with a first-half net loss of $80.7 billion, according to a draft prospectus reviewed by Reuters. The same document shows revenue sprinting upward, and a computing bill to match.

This is the kind of filing that makes a room go quiet and then very, very busy. Let us walk through it.

The loss is mostly paper

Start with the headline number, because it sounds like a disaster and mostly is not. Reuters reported that most of the loss came from an accounting charge rather than money spent running the business. Anthropic recorded a $72 billion non-operating charge tied to an increase in the estimated fair value of bonds that can eventually be converted into its shares. A year earlier, the first-half loss was $13 billion.

Subtract the charge from the total and you get a loss of roughly $8.7 billion from everything else. That is my arithmetic, not a figure from the filing, so treat it as a rough guide.

The pattern is not new. For the full year 2025, Anthropic reported a net loss of $42 billion, again largely because convertible note charges tripled as its valuation rose. Excluding that charge, the operating loss was about $8.1 billion on $4.6 billion in revenue.

Revenue is sprinting

The Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic generated $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026, up from $1.1 billion a year earlier. Revenue more than doubled between the first and second quarters, reaching $11.6 billion in Q2, according to the Reuters account.

Then came October 14. At a meeting with prospective IPO investors, Anthropic said third-quarter revenue rose 45% from the previous quarter to $16.8 billion, Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the matter. Reuters credits demand for Claude Code, the company's coding assistant for developers, as one driver of the expansion.

Some investors, Reuters reported last week, are now considering a valuation of around $1.5 trillion. Trillion. With a T. On a company that confidentially filed its prospectus with the SEC in early June.

The compute bill is the real story

Here is where the filing gets genuinely thrilling. Anthropic spent nearly $9 billion on computing capacity and infrastructure in the first half of 2026, against $2.3 billion a year earlier. That is more than the $7.3 billion it spent in all of 2025, according to the Journal.

And that is only the opening act. The commitments, as reported, are enormous, and the reports describe them differently:

• Reuters, via Ctech: at least $518 billion over a decade on cloud services, computing and infrastructure.
• The Journal, via Axios: more than $600 billion in future infrastructure costs, with talks on additional deals that could add another $150 billion, for a possible $750 billion.
• The Journal, via Business Standard: around $450 billion in computing agreements over the next seven to 10 years, the majority of which cannot be canceled.

The reports do not reconcile those totals, and the material available gives no explanation for the gap. What they agree on is the scale. The roughly $450 billion in agreements includes $111 billion with Google Cloud, $110 billion with Amazon Web Services and $31 billion with Microsoft.

The filing also lists risks, including a narrow customer base and uncertain access to much-needed computing power. It does not say, in anything reported so far, who those customers are.

What it means for the market

The backdrop is a strange IPO year. According to Renaissance Capital, the number of U.S. IPOs priced in 2026 is down 33% from 2025, even though proceeds are up sharply thanks to mega-cap debuts such as SpaceX in June. Anthropic would be another giant arriving in a market that otherwise lists fewer companies.

Prediction market Kalshi, as of Monday, October 19, gave Anthropic 75% odds of officially announcing an IPO this year. It was the only one of 23 open markets above 50%.

And there is the matter of the alternative. OpenAI took months to secure more than $120 billion in its most recent financing round. A public listing is how you keep a bill this size fed.

What to watch

The filing is still a draft, and a lot is missing. Reports so far give no pricing, share count or total capital target, and no exact November date for the debut.

Watch three things. First, the final prospectus, for a single reconciled number on computing commitments. Second, whether the $150 billion in pending deals gets signed. Third, the slowdown from Q2's more-than-doubling to Q3's 45% sequential growth, which the reports do not explain. Forty-five percent in one quarter is still a staggering number. It is also a different number, and investors will ask why.

The story is simple enough to say in one breath: a company growing at breakneck speed, committing hundreds of billions to computing power, and asking the public to help pay for it. Everything is historic. Especially today.