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/porn_sub_lurker 1d ago

So the way it's worked in the past is that billionaire investors prop up the hemorrhaging company until the competition is destroyed, at which point the company can raise prices with total market domination and the investors make their money back. But this time the competition is basically any white collar worker, instead of niche industries like taxi or hotel services. I suppose they're also leveraged with other companies right now instead of just investors. So I guess it's just a question of whether or not they run out of money and crash the economy before they take all of our jobs and subjugate us with the police state.

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u/Mike312 1d ago

I think the problem is the competition is another set of billionaire hedge fund investors, as well as some groups (like Intel) playing all sides.

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u/Big_Work_2011 1d ago

And China. Basically just have to be the only surviving company of its kind in the entire world to have ROI. Sounds good

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u/Mike312 1d ago

Right? While also competing with the FOSS models, too lol.

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u/Pineapplepizzaracoon 1d ago

Like playing Russian roulette with 5 bullets?

1

u/daehoidar 21h ago

More like Russian roulette with 7 bullets.

1

u/SylvesterStapwn 1d ago

Sounds like Apple

1

u/Big_Work_2011 1d ago

It's like Apple, and you're buying in 2004 with all the growth priced in!

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u/CroakerBC 22h ago

To be fair, the gamble is "if you have invested in the only surviving company of its kind, and you develop an actual superintelligence, you now have control over the thing that runs the entire economy". So as an investor, it's not a bad thing to throw money at - there's only a couple of hyperscalers, and the reward to risk ratio is essentially infinite.

Now that still may not make it a good risk, and eventually even the investor with an eye on the "infinite returns" side of the ledger is going to want some returns.

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u/CorrectionCreator 1d ago

Also, the price hike would have to be crazy high. Like too high to be worth it

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u/JJZinna 1d ago

We will 1000% see cases where more money is spent on tokens than the worker that was replaced.

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u/alwayssunnyinskyrim 1d ago

We already are, there are already companies trying to hire people back because the AI they replaced them with suddenly skyrocketed in cost

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u/NomadStorm 1d ago

It’s not just because of the cost, it’s also because the AI doesn’t actually work well enough to replace people.

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u/alwayssunnyinskyrim 1d ago

They care about that way less though.

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u/NomadStorm 1d ago

They couldn’t give a shit about it, until it affects their bottom line

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u/Happyplace_s 1d ago

Totally depends on the task/job.

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u/NomadStorm 1d ago

Fair point. Most managers and executives could be replaced by it tomorrow and the businesses might actually perform better.

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u/MyFeetLookLikeHands 20h ago

for the same velocity as before AI, tons of engineers could already lose their jobs

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u/Jessir12 19h ago

One senior accountant checking & correcting the AI outputs can do the work of four to six junior accountants while only consuming the tokens worth ~ the salary of two junior accountants.

Now, where new senior accountants are going to come from now that their jobs have almost all disappeared? The answer is “some other company will train them”

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u/urTomatilo 14h ago

We already are seeing those, multiple companies had to send internal memos telling employees to reduce AI usage as it got super expensive, and by the way this is in a time when AI is super duper cheap for the user and basically subsidized... It is completely unsustainable...

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u/Background-Spot-5068 23h ago

Sure, if the companies want to go under in a hurry

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u/History-Buff-2222 1d ago

For personal use yeah. But if companies depend on it it could be worth it to them.

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u/DevelopmentSouth8801 1d ago

What companies have had this level of loss before becoming profitable?

I hear this said a lot, especially about Amazon ($3 billion lost over 8 years) and Uber ($30 billion over 10 years), but this is more than double their combined loss in 1/36 of the time.

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u/porn_sub_lurker 23h ago edited 19h ago

Why does it have to have the same level of loss for it to be the same model? It's doing disruption on a much larger scale. It would stand to reason that the losses are on a much larger scale too. Would it not?

Edit: lots of downvotes, but no answers to the question...

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u/Revolutionary_Ad6574 18h ago

I like your username, friend! Have an upvote.

-5

u/Artforartsake99 22h ago

But also no other company has literally become so powerful they could literally wipe out 10’s of millions of staff worldwide. That is why they are so valuable. Also, if they are letting currently so the amount of breakthrough is in scientific breakthroughs they will lead and get a cut-off will be worth trillions as well

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u/x021 1d ago

Open weight models will prevent that strategy this time. And both MS and Google will keep playing the catchup game simply because they must to stay relevant, plus they have (very) deep pockets.

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u/History-Buff-2222 1d ago

Thats the thing thats different this time. The only way to get an unassailable lead would be if there was a proprietary training methodology or new model architecture that improved LLM’s to an extent beyond what just throwing data + compute could do. That no one else would have access to

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u/Tycho66 1d ago

I'm imagining a time where data processing will be dominated by a few ai subscription brokers and all offline processing on our own machines will be illegal.

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u/Useful-Personality26 6h ago

there are chinese ais

1

u/Big-Soup74 1d ago

When do you think they’re going to take all our jobs and turn us into a police state?

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u/porn_sub_lurker 23h ago

They're making good progress on the police state part. Already using AI to make arrests with AI fabricated evidence. So I suppose they'll do it just as soon as they can.

1

u/shitfucker90000 20h ago

10Xing token cost is not financially viable for any of their customers

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u/porn_sub_lurker 20h ago

Who said anything about 10x cost increase? A 50% cost increase would be devastating. Especially if they'd have to hire and train a bunch of new engineers to do the job. That's expensive too.

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u/Hulkmaster 18h ago

don't forget china open models, which are about 80% of frontier models

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u/Icy-Performance-3739 1d ago

sounds like the reasons ive heard the second world war started.

0

u/Boo-Bees67 1d ago

This is way smarter than typical office workers. You obviously don’t keep up with the times