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/chickadee_guy 1d ago

AI is the only tech ive ever seen that loses more money the more people use it

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u/goog1e 1d ago

It's actually insane. I use it VERY amateurishly at work, and it's devastating how long it processes my stupid commands. I've probably used more compute power on AI since my work started using it a few months ago, than I have in the rest of my life until now.

There's no way anyone is gonna pay what this amount of power actually costs. Tech giants maybe, but not all the smaller players who are integrating it for minor process improvement right now.

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u/na-uh 22h ago

The only reason AI is getting any traction nowadays is that they're giving it away practically for free. If they'd changed what it cost to provide from the outset the bubble would never have even formed.

They're going to have to charge so much for the tokens to even get to revenue neutral that it will become nonviable for anyone but the richest to use. Like dollars-per-token level pricing.

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u/ChepaukPitch 21h ago

Also because of the bubble. If you show you have integrated AI in your company your valuation goes up. So everyone has an incentive to fake AI integration.

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u/JyveAFK 6h ago

I wonder if there's some potential to do /some/ processing up front on the device, that then figures out what's really needed, and then passes that over to a server farm offering the cheapest processing. Spot prices on AI work.
There's probably already a VC looking into this, isn't there?

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u/youre_being_creepy 21h ago

I wonder at what point do huge companies just start developing their in-house ai, or just buy smaller ai companies out right?

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u/foobarbizbaz 20h ago

But then they’d be losing billions too. Right now Anthropic and OpenAI are beating that cost for them. So far there’s not much evidence that running your own AI is cost-effective.

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u/sobrique 11h ago

Not soon. It's become insanely hard and expensive to buy any compute equipment in the last year or so, and it's looking like that'll continue for at least another year, maybe 2, because of just how expensive and time consuming it is to build a chip fabrication plant.

But huge swathes of the 'consumer' market are being diverted due to the gold rush on AI, so even a 'standard' server is now 3-10x the price it was a couple of years ago, and anything involving GPUs or the really fast RAM that GPUs need, you ... probably can't even buy at all, because the 'big boys' bought all of it.

We do have an in house GPU cluster, which we built a few years back - it's not great, but it'll run some of the higher end models, and get an answer eventually. (Not for AI use, but rather we have some GPU-compute research stuff)

It's very cost effective, but we've no hope of building something more up to date on a realistic time frame, let alone scaling it up to 'everyone in the company is using it'.

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u/wimpymist 22h ago

I think they are really gambling that the tech will drastically improve. I just don't see it happening

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u/arenaceousarrow 21h ago

Sorry, I really do not mean to be condescending here, but I'm very surprised to see people describe this as flash-in-the-pan technology that isn't worth investment. Can you describe your experience with it and how it fell short?

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u/between_ewe_and_me 14h ago

Not that reddit doesn't completely dismiss the technology in general, and I can't assume I know exactly what the comment you're responding to intended, but they could be saying they don't see it improving enough in efficiency to become cost-effective, which is pretty valid as far as I can tell. AI is objectively incredible. If you showed me what it can do now, 10 years ago, I don't think I'd believe you. That being said, I still don't believe it's worth the cost, economically or societally. I also don't think it's going anywhere, unfortunately. I have a tiny hope that at some point it can be regulated enough that it's only used for things like scientific and humanitarian endeavors, which actually aim to improve the general welfare of the planet and everything that lives on it, but realistically I can't ever see that happening without a major global incident or societal collapse. I just wish we, as a species, were capable of simply being responsible with new technology instead of always racing to figure out how we can exploit it to ruin everything.

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u/edfitz83 1d ago edited 1d ago

They might lose money on each transaction, but they make up for it in massive volume.

Edit, so someone doesn’t understand sarcasm.

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u/kicked_trashcan 19h ago

A discount on all transactions should solve it! Then everyone will buy so much more!

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u/urgrandpasdog 1d ago

I was gonna say it if you didn't

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u/Overly_Underwhelmed 1d ago

can I interest you in a Lucid Air?

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u/Ive_seen_things_that 1d ago

Isn't Twitch like that too? 

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u/hanks_panky_emporium 1d ago

I think so but it's so hard to believe. With how many ads are forced in, and with how insane the creator split is. Everytime a streamer is subscribed to or donated to on platform half is going to Amazon.

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u/Iamgentle1122 19h ago

Wasn't it 70/30 split for streamer/twitch?

Bandwidth is super expensive and the amount twitch uses is extremely high.

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u/cinderful 22h ago

i believe twitch is profitable now.

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u/Bytewave 14h ago

Don't worry, it'll make up for it with scale. :p

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u/shidderbean 9h ago

It's largely because the AI isn't good enough for people to want to pay for it, so they're hedging their bets that taking a loss on people using it 'for free' (or for cheap prices for commercial purposes) are going to train it to be better eventually until it becomes a product that people think is good enough to pay for

Except....literally nobody thinks it'll be good enough to pay for. AI today is leagues beyond AI of 2021, like insanely so from a core tech perspective, but it's still not quite good enough for regular people to justify spending money on.

My organization uses AI heavily, but we get certain AI products included with our subsciptions to other enterprise services. We have our own GCP farm running some more advanced Gemini models to do certain things but our monthly bill is only like $30-40 for that, because we're careful in how we use AI when it costs us money, and only apply it where it's useful and economical. (that $30-40 saves us hundreds of thousands in human labor)

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u/eetuu 20h ago

Tesla for a long time also lost more money if they sold more cars.

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u/Competitive_Touch_86 8h ago

AI is the only tech ive ever seen that loses more money the more people use it

Inference is profitable. Yes, even the $100-200/mo subscriptions are gross profit at the moment. API pricing is effectively a money printer.

Just look at yesterday's Deepseek releases if you don't believe me. Those numbers match what I've seen internal documents for third party inference providers. The frontier labs are going to be even more efficient than that due to various tricks they can employ due to larger scale.

You are talking $2-5/hr in costs to run the GPUs including capex, and $30-35/hr in revenue per GPU-hour at the moment. Based on a 60% capacity factor, which is right now about as good as it gets. These margins are going to get severely compressed over time, but at the moment if you have the ability to spin up compute for inference you are operating a token factory money printing machine since demand is wildly outpacing supply.

Training and R&D overhead is the giant question mark and why I'm not an investor in frontier labs. But those do not scale with the number of users.

There is tons of malinvestment going on, and shitload of scammers and grifters in the scene. But anyone telling you it costs more than you can charge to provide inference is ignorant at best.

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u/chickadee_guy 7h ago

Training is a fixed cost that must be performed on a regular basis. Its essentially fraud to exclude it from your expenses as an AI provider, and it constitutes the vast bulk of their compute costs.

Inference also is not profitable still, and all publicly available evidence from the frontier labs shows this. They lose money on every frontier model query, and it isnt even remotely close.

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u/OBLIVIATER 18h ago

Almost every startup is like this? It's literally the "hyperscaler" playbook to a T. The real gamble is that they're praying on a dream that AI will be worth it to people when they have to pay 5x as much to use it. I think we all know that answer is no for 99% of the population.

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u/chickadee_guy 15h ago

No, most startups make more money the more users they have.

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u/OBLIVIATER 12h ago

In tech? No they don't. Youtube, twitter, Uber, Lyft, Twitch, reddit, and many others all lost money for YEARS, with losses growing as the companies grew until they were able to eventually pivot into profitability with large monetization changes.

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u/chickadee_guy 12h ago

They lost money, but that didnt mean that they lost MORE money the MORE USERS on their service. It was the opposite. The losses were also at the scale of less than 10$billion, not the entire GDP of soverign nations.

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u/OBLIVIATER 12h ago edited 12h ago

They literally DID dude. Like, famously so. The service they provided per user cost them far more money than they earned per user. Uber/Lyft was paying drivers like 3x the amount that they were charging customers for years. Twitch stated that the average viewer was costing them 10x more in server bandwidth than they were contributing via what limited ads were running on the site in the early years, same with YouTube.

Please spend 5 minutes learning what blitzscaling means before you try correcting people with wrong information.

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u/chickadee_guy 12h ago

None of those companies lost as much money as the GDP of a sovereign nation. We are talking $100+ billion losses. Lmao. Youre making a fool of yourself

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u/OBLIVIATER 12h ago edited 11h ago

When did I ever state they lost more than the GDP of a country are you delusional?? I was stating that they lost more money the more users they had.

YOU were the only one mentioning that irrelevant point, which is correct but not what I was talking about at all. Do not try to move the goalposts, it's embarrassing.

Edit: A 5 second Google search to back up my example of Uber.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/technology/farewell-millennial-lifestyle-subsidy.html

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u/Ok-Youth-160 22h ago

Not true. They are making money on tokens.