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EG Erin Griffith On Hard Fork (NYT)

“An $80 billion net loss seems insane, but it's actually kind of a weird accounting quirk where they have to count some convertible debt that they issued to some of their shareholders as a net loss. … What we've actually seen is that in the first half of this year, they had an operating loss of around six to $700 million. And that's shrinking from the same period last year where it was over $2 billion.”

Hard Fork (NYT) · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026

“An $80 billion net loss seems insane, but it's actually kind of a weird accounting quirk where they have to count some convertible debt that they issued to some of their shareholders as a net loss. … What we've actually seen is that in the first half of this year, they had an operating loss of around six to $700 million. And that's shrinking from the same period last year where it was over $2 billion.” — Erin Griffith, Hard Fork (NYT)

Context

The host asked for the big takeaways from Anthropic's S-1. Griffith, who covers the company and has read the filing, says the business looks healthier than the headline loss suggests, even as it commits to huge infrastructure spending.

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Transcript

Hard Fork (NYT) Around 05:14 into the episode
Erin Griffith

…nervous. Now we've, you know, had a day or two to kind of look at these numbers and see. And some of them have leaked already along the way. So we had kind of a sense, but this is the first time we see like in a 300 plus page document, the full picture of what Anthropic's business looks like.

Speaker 2

So let's go there. What are the sort of big important things that we can take away from the S1?

Erin Griffith

…to see that this company is capable of making money. And I mean, when we've seen how much money these companies have raised over the years, we've seen how much they've been spending to build their AI products. I think the general consensus has been like these companies can never make money. And just to be clear, Anthropic. Posted an $80 billion net loss. So maybe let me unpack that a little bit. An $80 billion net loss seems insane, but it's actually kind of a weird accounting quirk where they have to count some convertible debt that they issued to some of their shareholders as a net loss. And that will essentially be cleared in the next quarter by the time they go public. And so that's not a reflection of the health of their actual business. What we've actually seen is that they, in the first half of this year, had an operating loss of around six to $700 million. And that's shrinking from the same period last year where it was like over $2 billion. So they're shrinking their…

Speaker 2

I mean, it's interesting because, on the one hand, the S1 seems to confirm that there's an enormous amount of demand. I mean, we're talking about $16.3 billion in revenue for the first half of 2026. And that is an

Erin Griffith

enormous amount of growth, too. Like, you know, it's, we're seeing a company grow 14x. I mean, that is insane, especially for a company of this size. So we've never, I mean, I hate to like say unprecedented, but it feels like we haven't seen a company growing like this ever before.

Speaker 2

Right. So we can say there's demand for this, right? But with the question that you're saying, is we don't actually know how much it is. And it might be that there's more even than we've already seen. It might be that there's actually less, but we're building a certain number of computers. I mean…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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