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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Hacker News is the epitome of this! If you find yourself not enjoying your daily dose of "someone is wrong on the internet" (via the immortal https://xkcd.com/386/) as you find yourself crafting the perfect response, you can always close the tab!
and ironically, most of them don't even offer the draft feature! Facebook, tiktok, etc... they send your typed message, but if the app crashes or you close it, there's no draft anywhere you can find ;)
You can, but this is public and maybe you should post. If "you are what you repeatedly do" then we all collectively are what we all do.
If we each stop arguing with racists because we're each tired of it, then what we are is a society that lets racism go unopposed, a site with racist comments proliferating, a site where racists gather because they are able to be themselves, a site where future readers and AI training is learning that racism is popular, common, normal, and acceptable because everyone is accepting it.
It's a bit like democratic voting, your vote doesn't matter and cannot change things, but it's important that you vote because all of our votes do matter and can change things.
It's a bit like the quote "Dear Board, I don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member. Sincerely yours, Groucho Marx.", I am upset and offended every time someone calls out my dumbass comments, but horrified at all the countless times nobody does. Why would I want to waste my time on a site with such low standards that it lets me comment? I'm exhalted and encouraged everytime someone upvotes or engages with my low effort quips[1] but thrown into a chasm of despair that HN users let that pass unopposed. When nobody engages with comments I spent literal hours on[2] I curl up into a ball and die, but also dream of it being a feather in my cap with dang that I'm posting a substantial comment and that will be its own reward. I identify with nobody more closely than Colonel Cathcart, and I will be delighted if someone engages with my Catch 22 reference, but aghast that such a nontechnical reference gets engagment; distraught if nobody engages but delighted that perhaps HN standards are being held higher.
(1) I admire your energy, but sir/ma'am this is a Wendy's.
(2) I am very confused that you thought I was talking about tolerance-of-intolerance types of conversations, when I was more intending to say "I don't need to write an essay responding to technical comments even if I think I have a different angle of technical insight than the commenter, and not worrying about that can be freeing."
(3) For posts like the ones you mention that do trigger the "tolerance of intolerance" paradox, sometimes the very "feeding" of a troll is what makes them feel part of a community, and refusing to engage can indeed be the right way to handle those messages, and the morally correct thing to do.
(4) Not to mention that there are many ways to effect change that are higher-leverage, and less wearing on one's limited stamina, than replying to every disagreeable comment on the internet.
(5) I'm not proud that I've written a five-point answer here. It has not sparked joy, but I've written one anyways. Do what sparks joy, and consider my reply here a cautionary tale.
(2) I didn't think that, it was an example. I didn't want to pick a technology as an example and have my comment be dragged off into whether my pick was good or bad so I tried to pick something away from tech. As in "be the change you want to see in the world", if you want less FORTRAN enthusiasm, counter it, if you want more FORTRAN, add to it. It's easy to see that a site overrun with racism looks like a place that approve of racism, it's much harder to see that a site with 0.001% more FORTRAN content affects anything - that's what the voting comparison was about.
(3) I wasn't really meaning trolling, I was meaning your "someone is wrong on the internet" about some topic you are interested in / care about.
(5) I thought we were all on the "amusing ourselves to death, wireheading, Brave New World, hedonism is bad" train.
You overthink this. Participating in HN is in no way like democratic voting. And sometimes it is my (or yours) comment that is the problem.
Let's not pretend that 90% of HN comments are world-changing. Maybe you are different, but a lot of my would-be comments are knee-jerk reactions that won't actually bring anything substantial to the discussion. Often in political comment chains. Yes, I feel I'm right, but it's still probably not worth posting. I really think that sometimes stopping before posting is better for everyone involved.
I also have well thought comments, where I share my thoughts on things I'm an expert in. I do post them. But a lot of the comments is not really that valuable.
>comments I spent literal hours on[2]
It may make you feel better that I saw both of your posts before (I may spend too much time on HN). They are good, though a bit verbose - maybe this intimidates people. But in this case I agree with GP - if I was spending literal hours responding to comments here I should definitely stop myself.
You’re absolutely right, but I need to go to the bathroom/get some coffee/take a smoke break/get back to this task now so we’ll have to discuss this further later.
I was setting up my kid’s laptop last year. Parental controls enabled, with the kid’s age entered. Start menu was showing stories about beheadings and murders.
Windows is rotten to the core.
The scariest part is just how many people stick with the default settings, and get this stuff pumped into their brains 24/7.
I hope some day we’ll take this as seriously as environmental protection. Which granted isn’t perfect either, but a lot more than we do about all the mental toxicity being spewed at scale by large tech firms.
I haven’t used Windows for more than 30 seconds since XP. Every time I hear about what it’s become, I’m just baffled. I never considered it to be good, but at least it tried. Now it seems like another example of big companies hating their customers and wishing they’d just get out of the way of the money coming in.
> I hope some day we’ll take this as seriously as environmental protection. Which granted isn’t perfect either, but a lot more than we do about all the mental toxicity being spewed at scale by large tech firms.
The problem is that, as we are currently seeing, that any administration can reverse any policy previously set. So any regulation is not a permanent solution.
> The problem is that, as we are currently seeing, that any administration can reverse any policy previously set. So any regulation is not a permanent solution.
Depends on what you mean by "can". You're right in that any administration that successfully abandons the rule of law can do anything they want, but that's not a problem inherent to regulation as a concept. Regulation is a good solution, but it won't work when a corrupt, lawless regime is in power. It's kinda like saying we shouldn't vaccinate because being forced to drink toilet water can kill us.
As for not being a permanent solution, that's okay. No regulation is meant to be permanent. Regulations are supposed to change, but there's supposed to be a process to follow and that process is supposed to ensure that the change happens for the good of the society and is governed by the will of the people.
The fact that none of those prerequisites are currently satisfied does not imply that regulation doesn't work.
This administration has gotten SCOTUS to agree that many of these agencies are under control of POTUS and not independent agencies. That means the agencies work at the whims of POTUS or else POTUS will replace the agency leadership with people that will. That will see an exodus of other people that would potentially put up any resistance.
So I'm not really sure where you seem to think an abandonment of rule of law is at play
The rule of law means that everyone, including the administration, has to follow the laws. When an administration repeatedly ignores or defies court orders, they have abandoned the rule of law.
I'm surprised at the negative comments here. I'm about halfway done reading the report - I think it's clear, well written, and quite frankly the opposite of fluff.
A document like this isn't going to magically "solve" the use of AI in higher education. The purpose is to define a shared understanding of the situation across a large, complex organization, and set an initial direction and general shape for actions to take.
It contains clear, specific observations of how AI is organically changing the reality of education. And, in my opinion, fairly clear high-level guidance on what MIT as an entity wants to do about AI, and what individual departments and faculty should decide on their own.
A document like this doesn't need to be revolutionary, it may feel like fluff because no specific item in it is particularly surprising or groundbreaking, but the value is in having the entire document as a whole. And it is a lot more comprehensive and well thought out than what most companies can put out.
I'm not arrogant enough to think I know more about this than an expert who's devoted their life to ocean research, but the article itself comes across as a list of grievances against the Ocean Cleanup project rather than an objective review - mostly due to emotionally charged language like "apparently killing enormous numbers of marine organisms" and "out there spewing diesel fumes from a ship that cost $100,000 a day"
It took a bit of digging, but it looks like around 80% of the plastic the Ocean Cleanup has captured comes from rivers - while the article focuses mostly on criticizing the open ocean catch. It would be interesting to see what is the budget split between the two methods, but I couldn't easily find it.
It makes sense to me that removal requiring infrastructure will be more costly than unpaid volunteers on land. It is NOT clear to me if that means the infrastructure solution is not worth pursuing in parallel. It does seem the open ocean catch is ineffective compared to the river capture, and I can understand that argument. Not so clear to me if / why river capture should be scrapped in favor of the volunteer beach cleanup, as the article seems to imply. Intuitively, pursuing both would makes more sense. Again, this would be a very interesting analysis to see.
> Unfortunately, it also shows how some people can take certain ideas too closely to heart — and take it personally when those ideas are criticized. When experts started speaking out about the Ocean Cleanup several years ago, I witnessed several of them endure online harassment from supporters of the organization, often phrased as “At least they’re trying to do something to help, all you do is complain.”
To be honest, yes, this article seems to be getting the same response. Doesn't mean the criticism is invalid, but public communication is a skill in itself, separate from depth of expertise in a subject.
The charging port might just need cleaning. I’m still using an iPhone 11 and the charging port was getting super unreliable. I cleaned it a couple of weeks ago - gently, with a toothpick and a flashlight, there was some lint stuck inside - and it’s worked perfectly since then.
This - I have the iFixit cleaning kit which has a really tiny plastic pick / brush thing - I think it might be a dental crevice cleaning tool, like floss but for bigger gaps. I got a wad of lint out of my lightning port and all of a sudden CarPlay works perfectly. Same thing happens to USB-C ports.
Is it just me, or was Lightning the most prone port to get clogged up with crap and have moisture end up inside it? Used to happen to me all the time, but USB-C hasn't been a problem at all.
If you're going to make a point, make your point - don't just throw numbers around without context.
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