r/technology • u/CarciaNerissa • 1d ago

Artificial Intelligence Anthropic logged net loss of over $80 billion in first half of 2026

https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-recorded-net-loss-over-80-billion-first-half-this-year-wsj-reports-2026-10-20/
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u/hobskhan 1d ago

What kind of estimates do we have of true token costs?

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u/AMeasureOfSanity 1d ago

Considering their revenue of 4.6 billion coupled with a loss of 42 billion on those sales, probably somewhere around 10x current costs.

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u/Paddy_Tanninger 1d ago edited 1d ago

Nah I don't think it's even close to that. They're scaling up right now and paying shitloads of money for hardware they'd amortize over the next couple years.

Anyone who has run their own local models knows it's really not that wild in terms of compute resources.

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u/joeyb908 1d ago

Everyone saying it costs them this much to actually do the inference is wild.

The actual inferencing isn’t that expensive… it’s the cost of them prepping and scaling for the future.

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u/FrewGewEgellok 15h ago edited 15h ago

But the money for future investments has to come from selling a product eventually, and inference is their product.

When a car maker sells a car they don't only charge the cost for the raw materials, because being able to make that car costs a lot more. Same with inference, on top of power usage and maybe cooling you have to include all the cost for building data centers, hardware, research, bribes and everything else because that is the cost of them being able to sell their product.

Not saying that they actually lose 10x or 20x the money per token that they say is for inference. A lot of their supposed losses are just fictional value being shuffled between corporations, but as you said, there is a real price tag on prepping and scaling for the future.

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u/ROKIT-88 19h ago

They’re not buying hardware because they don’t own their own data centers. They’ve signed lease agreements with other companies to build data centers dedicated to them, but they aren’t putting up money for the hardware up front. There’s nothing to be amortized, just what they’ve spent so far and many more spending commitments for the future.

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u/Jcsq6 23h ago

Yeah, if you assumed all of their spending was on inference. In reality a very small portion of it was. Their bill is due to the half a trillion dollars in data centers they’re building.

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u/jeffwulf 1d ago

This report says they had inference revenues of a bit over 16 billion and total compute costs of 9 billion for both training and inference combined. True token costs are well below what they're charging.

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u/dwild 1d ago

So where did the 90 billions remaining go and why do they still spend it?

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u/jeffwulf 1d ago

72 billion of it was the value of stock owed to investors increasing due to the estimated value of the company increasing. The other big costs are employee costs.