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/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 56m 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.