If you're going to make a point, make your point - don't just throw numbers around without context.
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.
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.
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.
Because that's worse than losing money, that's incompetently giving it away.
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.
I do not expect to find that Anthropic invested enough in the SAFEs of other companies to lose $80B on their investments.
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)
It's a good problem to have.
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.