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

They don’t even have data centers, haha - it’s a full Enron situation.

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u/CarlFromHungerForce8 1d ago

It's like leveraging yourself 20:1 on new types of cars that half the time just explode. This AI bubble is insane.

I actually think some of its applications is very useful, but that doesnt mean it will be profitable especially with all the competition from not only other companies but entire nations.

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u/VonSkullenheim 22h ago

Plus the fact that tons of this technology has open source counterparts. Anybody can run their own AI setups on even regular consumer hardware. If you're willing to buy a few specific parts, you can run really advanced AI setups, 100% local.

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u/uhdoy 22h ago

It costs thousands in hardware and you wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near something like GLM 5.3 on your own hardware an unaffordable outlay. It’s not something that is accessible to the regular person’s budget and still have comparable quality to the flagship/frontier models.

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u/TalesfromCryptKeeper 22h ago

That's the point, as I understand it. Hook industries into flagship models so they can't live without them, and keep milking them with new releases and quick obsolescence of previous models (courtesy of removing maintenance and security features, or not managing them anymore) so the gap between local and top tier models continues to grow.

You'll get people arguing that deepseek and its like are the future and not Anthropic, being much cheaper, but my guess is that it comes with undesirable features which is why Fortune 500s haven't just jumped ship to Deepseek.

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u/BiDiTi 17h ago

The F500s haven’t jumped ship because Anthropic is giving away frontier models at the price of open weight ones.

The issue is that the enterprise end user doesn’t actually need a frontier model.

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u/TalesfromCryptKeeper 15h ago

Interesting. Do you think then that as prices keep increasing that F500s will jump ship to cheaper models, or will it be a sunk cost type situation?

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u/BiDiTi 13h ago

That’s exactly what I expect - it’d become increasingly obvious that the frontier labs premise consists of taking a million screwdrivers and telling people they’ll be as good as a drill when they have a billion of them.

Screwdrivers are really useful - sometimes you even need fancy, expensive ones for certain jobs!

They aren’t drills and will never be drills.

I can definitely see hyperscalers recouping by renting out cloud compute to companies who don’t want to own the maintenance of hosting on premise…but that market doesn’t remotely resemble what they’ve been promising investors.

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u/TalesfromCryptKeeper 12h ago

I appreciate your insight (seriously, not being sarcastic). We're already seeing AI data centers renting out server space for other functions, usually heavy compute crypto operations, so it feels like most hyperscalers being built are a game of overpromising and underdelivering.

Fun times all around.

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u/uhdoy 22h ago

I agree. AI is amazing and I think we’d all be better off without it.

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u/danarchist 22h ago edited 22h ago

I'm envisioning fractional llm spaces. Clearly my $20/mo anthropic subscription is unsustainable. But ollama frontier models 18 months from now, run on hardware that me and 5 friends buy at firesale prices? Yeah that'll probably be $20/month per person and comparable to today's claude which does everything I want.

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u/uhdoy 22h ago

Yeah I’d be a fool to predict that far out- I’ve frequently been surprised at the pace they e advanced.

AI is both amazing and we’d be better off if we tossed it in to a volcano.

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u/BookIntelligent254 21h ago

It will be more affordable (not cheap) when the bubble pops at least

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u/BiDiTi 17h ago

But the flagship/frontier models aren’t worth the difference in cost, for any scalable enterprise application.

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u/uhdoy 12h ago

That’s fair. For my part I’ve had ok success with less popular models like Kimi K2.6, GLM 5.3, via Ollama’s cloud offering because I think I get better bang for the buck than I would w the Claude and ChatGPT $20/month plan.

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u/Quereller 16h ago

I am absolutely happy with Qwen 3.8 Flash Next on a gamer PC. I use it for 95 % of the tasks. It can research when it doesn't know something. It's sufficient for normal "home family use" for sure.

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u/uhdoy 12h ago

Yeah, I was just trying to make the point that there’s a world of difference between them. I have no doubt that you’re able to have an acceptable experience. Probably not as doable from a lay person though, right?

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u/Quereller 12h ago edited 12h ago

I'm using Strata (no advertising) and since v2 they have really simple installers for all Win, Linux and Mac. Try it yourself link (Maybe check the needed hardware spec before and its a 70-90 GB download).

The thing is if cost for RAM and SSD would have stayed the same, then a middle class PC of the next generation could run it easily.

Edit: Check out this comparison someone posted on r/localllama link

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u/Fallingdamage 20h ago

Yep. Remember last month (i think it was) when amazon/microsoft/google had some issue with data connections and BGP routes and suddenly Anthropic/Grok/GPT all went offline at the same time? They're all just renters.

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u/GoldandBlue 21h ago

Good thing we learned so much from that and the great recession. Now we have very robust regulation to prevent such things from happening again.

Right?