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/bgibbz084 1d ago

There is zero chance this “blows up” in a way that goes back to our old means of software engineering. I’m sympathetic that you can’t find a job, but the industry has fundamentally and permanently shifted.

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u/Least-Woodpecker-569 1d ago

It’s still shifting - and I have absolutely no idea where and how it ends. Watching it from inside as a software engineer.

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u/BagelsOrDeath 1d ago

Ditto. At this point on the backside of my career, I was expecting to lean on and be paid based on my expert knowledge and experience. Well, AI has commoditized that. I have no idea where this goes. I'm terrified.

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u/redaemon 1d ago

If the economy doesn't go tits up, I can at least retire. We have enough for me to retire as long as my wife keeps her stable job.

If the economy goes tits up... I guess I'll see everybody else in the bread line lol

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u/assblast420 19h ago

Watching it from inside as a software engineer.

What's interesting is seeing how many of my colleagues aren't noticing the shift.

Just last week I overhead a couple of my senior developer team members talk about "trying" AI. Like, talking about how the technology seems promising for "light" work and writing some tests.

That was the state of AI in like... 2023, 2024. Now AI is so good that I don't write code anymore. My job has shifted from senior software dev to something more like a QA and AI-manager role.

It's going to be devastating for us when people really start seeing whats going on. If people think hiring is bad today, imagine what it's like when employers realize that they can get as much done with one AI-assisted developer as they did with an entire team of developers previously. It's that bad already, and it's going to get so much worse.

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u/MysteryMooseMan 13h ago

how many credits or tokens are you being provided by your employer? is it just an unlimited hose or what? cuz I'm only allotted 3,000 Copilot credits a MONTH by my employer. an end to end task using Opus 5.5 might easily take 500-800 credits. two of my friends work at different companies at SWE went through the identical cycle of "your performance will be based on how much you use AI" at the begining of the year to "hey guys, we're imposing limits on AI usage to mitigate operating costs"

so what are YOU gonna do when you don't have Claude or GPT to write code for you? have you abandoned writing code all together?

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u/assblast420 8h ago

how many credits or tokens are you being provided by your employer?

Enough that I've hit 60% of the monthly allowance at most, running Opus 5.5 on high. I think we have a really high budget and there's a personal pool plus a shared pool among a very large developer team where most of them don't seem to use it much.

so what are YOU gonna do when you don't have Claude or GPT to write code for you?

I have 10 years of experience and I haven't forgotten how to code. I'll be fine.

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u/bgibbz084 2h ago

Your company is behind the times. For 1, copilot sucks and is not a legitimate tool for serious companies.

We have custom tools built around a blend of Claude Opus 5.5 / Fable, Astra 6 and GPT SOL. We self host internal models and many open source ones and have selectors to grab the correct model. We have massive rollouts of custom agents running autonomous and with autorun enabled in custom sandboxes.

Per user we get $50k a month of spend max.

I haven’t written a line of code in over a year, and my company is only increasing AI rollout. We have custom benchmarks and metrics for productivity and AI success. Current metrics show an average of 3-5x productivity gain per employee. We expect that to increase to 5-6x by end of year.

62% of bugs today are fully reproed, triaged, solved, and tested entirely autonomous by AI. A human reviewer hits an approve to merge the code and that’s it. We expect that to hit 80% by end of year.

I think my company is about 1 year beyond most of the industry. Startups are ahead of us even. Any company that isn’t fully embracing and adopting these flows, standing up AI infra teams, and leading AI first studies and implementations will be destroyed in the next 3 years. They fundamentally won’t be able to compete. We are already abandoning vendors whose tools we have ground up built and replaced. If your company is using copilot, you’re probably 1 year behind the industry.

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u/MysteryMooseMan 1h ago edited 1h ago

well, fuck me I guess 🤷‍♂️ yeah I am aware my company is behind the times. it's small. CEO sucks ass and our product is probably never gonna see the light of day. I really wanna find a new position but it's so soul draining working all day I barely have motivation to be actively searching/applying. burnout sucks.

how would you recommend I position myself better with AI tooling? try and get some local models running? the resources available at my job are obviously super handicapped, so I'd have to do stuff on my own.

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u/bgibbz084 55m ago

Expertise is invaluable. The tools still often fail at building something brand new from scratch. I think of myself these days as being a “local expert” - I know how something should work and how it’s intended to work, and my job is to articulate that and direct the agents to make changes towards making that happen. Think of yourself as a swe manager.

Honestly, I think most companies will take years to fully embrace what’s possible so building knowledge and experience now is key.

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u/Competitive_Touch_86 8h ago

The other funny this is, the AI-driven folks ahead of the curve largely use it at the moment to free up time for themselves. They are not really bringing a huge amount of that time saved back into their orgs. Enough to still be the most productive in the team perhaps, but not much beyond that.

And they are not as clever about this as they think. Executives understand this fact, and eventually it will be accounted for.

We are in the early stages of some very interesting stuff indeed.

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u/FragrantKnobCheese 15h ago

If people think hiring is bad today, imagine what it's like when employers realize that they can get as much done with one AI-assisted developer as they did with an entire team of developers previously. It's that bad already, and it's going to get so much worse.

And all they have to do is fork over wheelbarrows of cash to an American company who can command whatever price they like once this becomes the "industry standard" way to do development.

As a European, I think this would be dangerous and stupid. As someone who owns and runs a software business with employees, we don't use AI because so far I think it's an expensive, technical debt machine that would make our jobs that of miserable code reviewers.

Maybe my business will have its lunch eaten by companies using AI, maybe it won't. I honestly hope the bubble bursts and the whole thing just disappears for good but I'm fairly sure that's not going to happen.

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u/assblast420 14h ago

I honestly hope the bubble bursts and the whole thing just disappears for good but I'm fairly sure that's not going to happen.

Same. But I fear the cats out of the bag and we're never going back to how it was. Even if OpenAI and Anthropic collapse, other companies will take their place. We've got open chinese models which are almost as capable at a fraction of the already subsidized american costs.

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u/jt121 1d ago

Yep, and that terrifies me because I've spent this money on something I have no experience in and likely won't be able to find a good position in.

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u/Alarmed-Quail7617 16h ago

As always, companies are looking for those that adapt to new tech than whine and bitch about it. Good luck on the job search 

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u/nokom 1d ago

If the new paradigm stays this expensive, it might legitimately have to go back to something at least closer to the old paradigm, like relying on local models. I honestly didn’t think it could be this bad…

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u/bgibbz084 1d ago

My companies metrics show we have actually saved money and we are heavy, heavy AI users.

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u/nokom 1d ago

Yeah, but did the AI provider make money on that usage? If it’s heavily subsidized, those savings may not look so great once they stop the subsidy. And that’ll happen sooner than later with losses like this

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u/bgibbz084 21h ago

The AI provider in many cases is my own company. Yes we made money.

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u/nokom 20h ago

You’re saying you work for Anthropic? Otherwise your response doesn’t make sense.

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u/bgibbz084 19h ago

I work for a top 5 tech company that builds and hosts our own models in addition to using openAI and Claude.

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u/geek180 1d ago

Same. “Saved money” is probably a stretch at this stage, although we are very close (~6 months) to clearing a few hundred grand off our annual software licensing expenses as a result of using AI to build our own, so far that is going very well.

But our productivity is absolutely increased significantly as a result of AI, and we are learning to do things ourselves that we could have never done. This is at a bio / pharma-related business.

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u/redaemon 1d ago

Costs will come down, that's how technology generally works.

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u/RandomRobot 22h ago

It's hard to charge less when you're already losing $40B per quarter

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u/redaemon 21h ago

The AI companies are screwed - open weight models are keeping up in quality and don't have enormous debts to repay. We are already at the point where existing tech companies are internally swapping to in-house models. 

But even if the AI labs die, the technology won't. I.e. Dot Com bubble didn't kill the internet. 

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u/danarchist 22h ago

It's accounting games, not real losses.

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u/danarchist 21h ago

People downvoting you have no idea how fast things are progressing in the open source LLMs.

12 months from now, everything the frontier models of today can do will be available locally if you have beefy hardware, or through rented cloud compute if you don't. Inference costs will keep falling, hardware will get more efficient, and the gap between open-weight and proprietary models will continue to shrink. The economics of AI compute are going to look very different in a year.

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u/redaemon 21h ago

I think people down vote stuff they disagree with or find uncomfortable. I can empathize. It is scary to think that a huge chunk of human knowledge jobs can be automated within our lifetime. 

The majority of people do not care how stuff is made, they only care about price and quality. So what will regular humans do when machines have them beat on both?

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u/theqmann 1d ago

Only if prices don't go up. Without VC money to buy and run the crazy expensive hardware, prices would skyrocket, and nobody would be spending 100x on tokens for the crap it puts out. Humans end up becoming cheaper again.

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u/Toasterzar 21h ago

Or people just use smaller, cheaper, maybe even locally-run models instead of the $$$ ones

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u/Specialist_Dark_3668 21h ago

Prices for tokens have been going down 10x or more for the same level of AI intelligence since GPT-1 released in 2018. Meanwhile, intelligence is getting smarter.

I don't know why this sub is so short sighted

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u/SnoobNoob7860 17h ago

if prices are going down that’s even worse as these companies aren’t profitable

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u/Sonder332 20h ago

There is literally nothing but guesswork to base this off of since anthropic and openAI are private companies and thus don't have to reveal that information.

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u/iokiae 20h ago

Not true. When you are a business customer you get pricing info since you pay per usage. It is very much so that Opus 5.5 is cheaper than Opus 4.6 while costing a bit less.

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u/Sonder332 20h ago

Could it not also be true that it's cheaper because it's subsidizing more on account if more VC investment?

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u/fisstech15 18h ago

The same can be observed for open weight models where we know exactly how much it costs to run them

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u/Sonder332 4h ago

Now this is different. Not different like an excuse, but different as this is hard evidence, and not guesswork or assumptions. Since I'm ignorant to open weight models, how do we know what it costs to run them? Genuinely asking. I haven't dipped my toes into open weight models yet.

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u/fisstech15 3h ago

From providers that host the models and 3rd parties that do it for research purposes. For instance https://inferencex.semianalysis.com/inference

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u/JuanAr10 15h ago

I really hope it shifts towards “LLMs are tools” kind of mindset and not “bow to your new AI God Emperor” kind of shit.

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u/RetPala 1d ago

How are you going to do any of that when all these data centers need to get shut down because they cost more than they make?

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u/Bleaker82 22h ago

You host local models.

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u/bgibbz084 22h ago

Companies today that are using AI properly are reeping profits.

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u/Competitive_Touch_86 8h ago

but the industry has fundamentally and permanently shifted

And it's only just begun. You are watching toddler level usage of AI at the moment. Assuming zero model capability improvements - just tooling, process, and workflow is only starting to be touched.

And that's software engineering. Most of white collar work hasn't even started to transition yet.

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u/bgibbz084 8h ago

Oh I’m aware. My company is 1-2 years ahead of AI adoption than most of the country. Some startups are ahead of us even. What’s possible today can already erase millions of jobs if companies cared to.

SAS is going to begin crumbling and then companies are going to begin relooking at how they adopt AI and we will see massive changes.

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u/SirYandi 20h ago

Just how it changed with the offshoring/outsourcing boom in the mid-late 2000s, which famously went so well

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u/bgibbz084 19h ago

This isn’t close to comparable