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| ▲ | epsteingpt 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | According to "Generally Accepted Accounting Principle" my friend. They are costs. Derivative liabilities, SAFEs - those are basically taking cash from RETAIL shareholders and giving them to employees and early investors INSTEAD of using it to fund the business. Let's have that discussion if you want, but don't act like a thing that is CLEARLY a COST to the business isn't a cost. | | |
| ▲ | brainwad 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | SAFEs work like equity in the upside case, and nobody ever says that it costs a company money when its stock price goes up and so its shareholders have more money. It's a bug in GAAP that if there's even a remote possibility of cash settlement, it has to be included on the income statement, even when that possibility is absurd, as it is here. | |
| ▲ | alex_c 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Okay, so expand on that. How do we expect this $72B number to change over time - especially after the IPO? Is it a one-time event, will it keep increasing by $xxB per quarter? When and how will the "chickens come home to roost", so to speak? What's the timeline on these liabilities? Will Anthropic need to settle them in cash, or in shares after a potential IPO? How big is this number compared to Anthropic's potential market cap and share float? I'm not trying to make a specific point, by the way, that Anthropic's business is healthy or unhealthy. I'm approaching this discussion with curiosity, and irritated that "$81B net loss in first 6 months of 2026 alone" is a thought-terminating simplification that makes no attempt to analyze or explain the actual situation. | | |
| ▲ | Rury 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The $72B number is just for convertible notes sold prior and through 1st half of 2026. They were issued as a way to finance growth costs (e.g. acquiring compute). There might be some additional sold in Q3, but that wasn't published here. But these notes aren't costs that Anthropic has to pay in any normal sense - they're shares they sold pre-IPO and valued at $72B. Anthropic would have to pay that much to buy them back at said valuation price, but they're not obligated in any way to do that. Post IPO, they'll have alternative avenues for sourcing funds... (e.g. secondary offerings, corporate bonds). Continued growth at this rate will need continued financing, but it wouldn't be done using convertible notes. The real liabilities are the hundreds of billions in non-cancelable compute costs Anthropic owes Google, Amazon etc, over the course of the next 10 years. |
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| ▲ | epsteingpt 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | principles* (GAAP) | |
| ▲ | vanuatu 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Huh? what retail shareholders? |
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| ▲ | nilamo 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Wait what does THAT mean? They got a huge inflow of money, and since they couldn't spend it all, they... bought bonds? And the value of those bonds dropped to nearly nothing? Because that's worse than losing money, that's incompetently giving it away. | | |
| ▲ | alex_c 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That's the discussion I WOULD like to see on HN, rather than "omg $81B net loss". My understanding is the opposite - Anthropic issued debt / liabilities tied to their company valuation, their company valuation skyrocketed, so the value of their liabilities also skyrocketed, resulting in a large accounting loss. But finance is not my wheelhouse, so I would love to hear this from someone who actually knows what they're talking about. | | |
| ▲ | npilk 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You are correct. Matt Levine discussed this in more detail in his last column (scroll down to the Anthropic section): https://wallhop.io/https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newslet... | |
| ▲ | jfrbfbreudh 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes, it is analogous to selling covered calls on stock. It’s $72B in “lost profits” that they would have had had they held onto it instead of selling it. | |
| ▲ | runako 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Inclusion of SAFEs makes this IMHO the most plausible explanation. I do not expect to find that Anthropic invested enough in the SAFEs of other companies to lose $80B on their investments. |
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| ▲ | Pragmata 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They agreed to pay some employees in their own shares to be delivered some time later. They recorded that expense then as a liability. The value of the shares increased because the company became more valuable, and therefore that liability needs to be revalued by 72 billion. It's a nice problem to have and is pretty much an accounting artifact coming from the fact that they are paying in different currencies (USD and shares) | | | |
| ▲ | santah 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | No, that's the result of their own (private) shares being worth more (which they owe to 3rd parties). It's a good problem to have. | |
| ▲ | jfrbfbreudh 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes, let’s all just take wild guesses at what this means instead of just looking it up. | |
| ▲ | kmgallahan 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| People keep bringing it up and it's silly. The huge number is actually a sign of their success. Most of those losses were pegged to equity. In only mildly inaccurate layman terms, it's essentially a promise to give out N shares. When the value of the company increases, say, 10x, the value owed also goes up 10x. For these types of deals, they write it as a loss even though they didn't lose a penny. They didn't lose any money, though. It's just a promise to give them based on the equity. If they IPO tomorrow and it turns out their valuation is 10x lower than what it currently is pegged at, the "loss" will magically drop from over $70B to $7B. |
