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/BiDiTi 1d ago

Ahhh, once you’re actually asked to pay something resembling its cost…you’ll hire a junior.

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u/mavajo 1d ago

My YTD Claude Code costs (and I use it extensively) are less than $1,500. Even if we assume it's operating at 10% of what it actually costs, $15,000 is still far cheaper than a junior dev.

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u/sandefurian 1d ago

People don’t want to admit that code is becoming a commodity. There’s still tons of value in human direction and integration, but the code generation itself will be largely outsourced. And that is NOT going away. The cost has gone into development. Once that’s done it’s going to just be the data centers, which are comparatively very cheap

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u/bollvirtuoso 23h ago

Because the frontier labs are not hiring coders, right?

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u/3DBeerGoggles 18h ago

Suddenly recalling the recent-ish report of an LLM 'self improving' its code by some massive margin, only to discover that the LLM only managed to game the test and actual performance was within the margin for error.

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u/VGK_hater_11 11h ago

Do you think the majority of programmers are in frontier labs?

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u/bollvirtuoso 9h ago

No, but if coding was a commodity or AI was so much better at us than it, then surely the labsfor-profit corporations with access to models the rest of us don't even have would need fewer programmers, right?

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u/VGK_hater_11 9h ago

This is such a stupid comment I don’t even know where to start.

Frontier labs are never before seen cutting edge technology, obviously they need programmers and mathematicians.

99.999% of software engineers are not doing the above

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u/bollvirtuoso 9h ago

Is the argument that AIs are going to be better at humans than programming or not? You can't have it both ways.

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u/VGK_hater_11 9h ago edited 9h ago

You can absolutely have it both ways.

It’s better at 99.999% of the coding that software developers do. This super niche, mainly mathematics field, requiring the top talent in the world that’s used to improve the models doesn’t change that.

If you can’t grasp that you’re either being disingenuous to cope, or just dumb.

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u/bollvirtuoso 7h ago

Mainly mathematics. What fields have just been broken by these models? Is this where humans are? Maybe you're right, maybe AIs will take over.

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u/BiDiTi 9h ago

LLMs are just machine learning used in the dumbest, most expensive possible way, mate.

It had been possible for years before ChatGPT dropped…but actual researchers know it’s not a path to AI, while actual business folks knew the value prop wasn’t there to teach profitability.

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u/mavajo 1d ago

100%. I've been preaching this since the start of the new year. Coming to Reddit is like living in an alternate reality. The popular sentiment about AI on here is so far behind that it's genuinely insane to read. It's like it got trapped in 2023.

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u/sandefurian 1d ago

Same. Honestly kind of eye opening for me

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u/TrickyProfit1369 16h ago

Yeah, still talking about six fingers and making up stuff. Like sure sometime its wrong but the degree of improvement is massive. Like every white collar worker I know uses it and uses it somehwat successfully.

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u/BiDiTi 9h ago

Yep - my operative comparison would be car manufacturers.

Designers, engineers, project managers, and mechanics still get paid, once they become senior…but no human hands are actually building the car.

They shoulda unionized.

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u/MysteryMooseMan 12h ago

what models are you using? I have a limit of 3000 Copilot credits per MONTH and one end to end task using Opus 5.5 can easily chew through like 500-800 credits. I'm still writing 75% of my code.

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u/mavajo 11h ago

I'm using Opus 5.5 pretty exclusively right now. I'm not using Copilot though, so I'm not sure how that potentially factors into the cost you're seeing. I just use Claude Code via the Claude desktop app (I stopped using the terminals over the summer and haven't looked back).

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u/MysteryMooseMan 11h ago

now my question is, if your access to Claude was shut off all the sudden, how confident would you feel having to actually write code again?

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u/mavajo 11h ago

Completely incapable. I don't know how to code.

I'm a Business Analyst by title. Our Senior Developer retired in April. The plan was to slide one or two of our existing developers into his role. I started working on some tickets with Claude Code to bridge the gap...and it kind of just took off from there. I'm now essentially the lead developer on this app. Believe me, I know what you're gonna say and I totally get it. I don't know what to tell you, except that we haven't had a single meaningful production bug all year since I got involved, they've been reviewing the code I'm generating with Claude and are happy with it, and our release cadence has skyrocketed.

I'm sure there's a lot of variables here that have set me up for success, and I certainly don't think you can just give Claude Code to anyone and have them replace a developer - but in this case anyway, it's been shockingly successful. I was just hoping to get involved with handling some small bug fixes or enhancements here or there. I never imagined it turning into this. I've kind of become the poster boy for Claude Code in our shop.

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u/theqmann 1d ago

Depends on how high token costs goes. Maybe it goes up to 50x. At some point, humans become cheaper again, and only time will tell. New hardware prices have tripled for the whole industry, and nobody is making that money back with token current prices.

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u/Paddy_Tanninger 23h ago edited 23h ago

Anyone who has run local models knows that the cost of this shit really isn't that wild.

My 5090 can do respectable image gen tasks at decent resolutions in a few seconds. Videos in under a minute.

Yes I'm sure Anthropic is using far more complex models that require far more VRAM than the stuff you're pulling in with ComfyUI, but I really don't think any of this stuff actually costs an insane amount to run.

I hit Codex with probably 100-200 fairly involved coding/dev requests every day, and I've never really come close to using up my monthly limit on my $20 plan.

Lemme also add one huge benefit to these models...they let you very easily fork and implement your own versions of free open source software which is something I've always found notoriously difficult. The open source shit can be great, and it's free, but there's often SO MUCH you need to learn first before you can actually do anything with it.

Using Codex, I can just point it at some github page or a homepage for some open source project, and literally just say "here look at this software, download it, install it and get it up and running here in a separate project environment for testing"

3 minutes later you've got a very complex piece of software working that would have taken you forever to troubleshoot and do the same.

Not only that, but I can afterwards just go "write up comprehensive docs for how to work with this app, and put great tooltips into place when I mouseover everything"

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u/theqmann 22h ago

The problem is all these GPUs are like $10k for the cheap consumer ones, and like 20-50k for the pro ones. Running these in a datacenter wears em out in like 2-4 years. A $20k board that wears out in 4 years needs $5k a year (about $400 a month) in revenues to break even, before you even factor in power costs (say another $100). Factor in a 50% profit margin (so you can repay all those loans you took out) and you need to bring in $1000 per month per board you have. Lets say a board will service 4 users on average (these agentic workflow bots are crazy token heavy), that means each and every user needs to be paying $250 a month (or $125 a month if you just want to break even). The average pro user isn't paying anywhere near that now. And that's not even counting a ton of other expenses.

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u/Paddy_Tanninger 22h ago

Yeah but what kind of uptime are we assuming the average user is actually putting into their datacenter hardware?

I've been using Codex a "ton" the past week, but it probably only adds up to a total of ~1-2hrs of computing time.

I also have no idea whether or not my requests can run parallel with other users on the same GPU. It's entirely possible that my Codex prompt is just using 1/10th of an RTX PRO card in a server farm.

The Pro cards don't run nearly as hot as the consumer cards, they last a really really long time. I've been at studios with dozens of A6000 crunching GPU renders all day for years, and those cards just do not care, they are basically immortal.

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u/theqmann 20h ago edited 20h ago

If it's anything like my local LLM I run, it eats all my VRAM (4bit quantized Gemma 4) for results after 20 min of thinking tokens (I get something like 10-20 tokens per second). Ran the same prompt through Claude, and it still took almost 60 sec to run (20x faster and produced much better results). Can't imagine it's less VRAM than my card. The open models are natively 2 bytes (fp16) per parameter, so a 26B parameter LLM I use takes 50 something GB of VRAM. These newer MoE (mixture of experts) can actually be parallelized a bit, with each expert running on a different GPU, but that takes more HW since now you need dedicated HW per expert.

So say Claude gets 10x my performance, say 100 tokens/sec. I guess then you could compute token cost per second of compute time, and scale that up to get average max tokens per month for a single card. If I'm doing the math right, thats about 250M tokens per month per card if the card is 100% utilized. Looks like the top tier Claude API pricing is $10/million input tokens + $50/million output tokens. Just taking the output price, thats $12k per month, which is actually more than I expected them to be making.

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u/BiDiTi 17h ago

The price of that $20/month plan bears zero relationship to how much it costs to provide.

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u/Paddy_Tanninger 10h ago

I'm not sure how true that is, if you use their frontier Astra model, you can burn through your 5hr limit in minutes.

That means in a given $20 month you would only end up with maybe a couple hours of total compute time.

A $10/hr cloud machine is an insanely beefy one, multiple high VRAM cards, a few dozen CPU cores, 256GB+ RAM.

I don't really think they're giving much away for free here with these plans.

However I do think that heavy users benefit a ton from the fact that there's a LOT of people out there giving up $20/month for extremely little real usage. So it's a bit like how Planet Fitness is able to charge $15/month for a gym membership; they know that 90% of the subscriptions will go basically unused, so it's okay that 1% of members will go 5x a week and 9% will go 2-3x a week.

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u/mavajo 23h ago

Your entire post is based on nothing but vibes. Just absolute bullshit.

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u/theqmann 22h ago

Have you seen the cost of GPUs/RAM these days? There's no way they are earning enough revenue to pay for new hardware (or pay back the loans they took to buy the current set) when the current set starts dying in a few years. I've seen co-workers use 4-6 hours of agentic workflows a day on huge codebases. I can't imagine whatever computer its running on can handle a ton of other simultaneous users.

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u/mavajo 13h ago

Yes, and I also know tokens are getting significantly cheaper and more efficient. Token prices are not increasing - they're dropping. But like a lot of people on Reddit, you've reached a conclusion first based on vibes and then cherry-picked whatever evidence you think supports your feeling, and you're getting upvoted by other uninformed goobers riding the same vibes as you.

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u/theqmann 8h ago edited 8h ago

Token prices are dropping as the newly installed hardware comes online, so there's a glut of compute available. At some point, the compute vendors won't be happy with selling at a loss (to get their foot in the AI door), and will either exit the market (liquidate the hardware to recoup value) or raise prices. My forecast was for that future, which may not be for a few years still. Definitely not today, where everyone is still willing to bet big on AI becoming some huge labor force thing, and profit/loss isn't being factored in yet.

Having capital tied up in compute farms that's not producing any actual revenue isn't sustainable long term.

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u/BiDiTi 16h ago

If that’s 10% of what it costs…that’s not 10% of what they need to charge to justify their valuation and pay their debt.

I do 1000% expect this to put downward pressure on juniors’ salaries, with the devaluation of output bringing them in line with “normal” entry level knowledge workers.

(It has been rather funny watching devs realize in real time that they have always had more in common with manual labor than designers or lawyers or salespeople, now that output is no longer measured as productivity)

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u/mavajo 15h ago

I made 10% up to make a point. The real number isn’t that dramatic, which is the point.

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u/Paddy_Tanninger 1d ago

I've run my own models. They're extremely powerful and don't take very long to compute on my 5090.

Decent looking image gen takes a few seconds for example.

People really don't understand how much GPU power is actually involved in these processes.

Right now I'm using the $20 per month Codex plan and it's legitimately doing the work of someone who would be worth $200K a year. It's doing it much much much faster and every single time I ask for something, it's instant.

Even if they were undercharging me by something crazy like 100x...it's still easily worthwhile.

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u/foobarbizbaz 20h ago

Except the cost of running models on consumer hardware is no basis at all for the costs of running these DCs at scale. You’re talking about a toy. It’s like estimating cost of running an industrial bakery based on the yield of your EZ Bake Oven.

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u/ebrbrbr 1d ago

I can run a local model that is far more competent than I was as a junior, and it can program in every language and library under the sun.

The only costs are the $50 in annual electricity it takes to run for 4 hours a day, 261 days a year.

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u/jmlinden7 23h ago

You have to account for the cost of the computer hardware, which has a finite lifetime and degrades with use

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u/ebrbrbr 23h ago

About $3000. So now we're at $3050.