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Weird article. “Our annualized revenue as of March 2026 is $19b” is not “telling the public we’ve made $19b.” And the discrepancy the author points at is actual

Weird article. “Our annualized revenue as of March 2026 is $19b” is not “telling the public we’ve made $19b.” And the discrepancy the author points at is actually more like revenue to date “exceeds $5b” vs revenue to date looking like $6.7b. I hate to tell you, but $6.7b exceeds $5b.

darkwater 4mo ago
Maybe for people used to deal with financial announcements, but from my ignorant and naive point of view, if I read that claim I think instinctively that they made $19b during the last 12 months, not that they are going to maybe make it if they keep the same rate as the last month for the next 12 months.
- yen223 4mo ago
  "Annualized revenue" is a projection, and is known to be a projection.
  - throwaway713 4mo ago
    Interesting. I’m going to start describing my “annualized impact” in my performance self-reviews in terms of all the things I project that I’ll do.
    - fluidcruft 4mo ago
      Go for it. Be aware of what happens to your stock when expectations you set do not materialize.
      - sjsdaiuasgdia 4mo ago
        Dunno about that, somehow Tesla stock doing pretty well despite setting a lot of expectations that haven't materialized.
    - rvnx 4mo ago
      Investors don't want results anyway, they want a dream. Until the IPO which is the final boss stage where you are selling forward looking profits
  - csomar 4mo ago
    The problem is, annualized revenue doesn’t work when your income has a 3 standard of deviation month to month. It is standard for other fields/businesses but these tend to have stable month to month revenue.
    - nraynaud 4mo ago
      I would venture that's it's the whole reason they use it. because it doesn't work.
      - jeeeb 4mo ago
        If anything, it’s a very conservative estimate. Short of a major turn of events it seems very unlikely Anthropic’s revenue growth is going to slow to zero.
    - dcre 4mo ago
      It’s not deviating up and down. It’s deviating upward. It is necessarily going to wildly overstate the previous 12 months’ revenue while wildly understating the next 12 months’ revenue. There is no way to describe exponential growth in a single number that doesn’t do this. This is why adults with a brain look at the series.
  - qarl 4mo ago
    Yes but my mother-in-law doesn't understand it, so it's a lie.
- fluidcruft 4mo ago
  Wall Street be like that (and worse). Caveat emptor.
- matwood 4mo ago
  It's certainly not a perfect number, but what else are you going to do for a fast growing business? If it does 1B month 1, 5B month 2 and 10B month 3, how does an investor extrapolate the next 12 months? Obviously it's a forecast and will be imperfect without more data. Any potential large investor will be given more financials to help them determine if the 10B was a 1 time event or if it is actually recurring. The harder part is understanding the growth rate. The be fair to Zitron he claims that enterprise customers are likely paying up front so it won't continue in future months. But now we're into accrual for the future revenues which further complicates the analysis.
  - mbreese 4mo ago
    Even if an enterprise customer was prepaying, that would only show up on a cash balance statement, not as revenue for the month it was collected in. Yes, this is based on accrual in accounting terms. But because the revenue isn’t recognized immediately, collecting prepayment in February shouldn’t skew ARR reported in March.
    - matwood 4mo ago
      Per GAAP you are correct, but many of these ARRs are qualified as non-GAAP. So yes, a real analysis should do what you're saying but are they is the question. Also, if they are buying tokens with no time limit, that will complicate the accrual forecast. This could be why all of the downstream investor companies like Amazon are pushing their employees to tokenmax.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
vb-8448 4mo ago
"Exceeds $5b" is a weird way to say "5$b +34%" ... Don't get me wrong, I'm not a big fan of Zitron, but the narrative around revenues and profitability around AI labs are quite misleading.
- brainwad 4mo ago
  If you look at the table, the implied revenue for March 2026 was $1.58b. So isn't this just a case of the $5b number being from one month earlier than the $6.66b number? Ed dismisses this, but it seems to be the obvious answer - the CFO quote is from March 9, 2026, so 70% of the March 2026 revenue presumably had not yet been earnt. If you subtract that out (or even the whole month, which would also make sense), it checks out: you get something between $5.08b and $5.54b, reasonably describable as "exceeding $5b".
  - vb-8448 4mo ago
    The $19b ARR is from March 3rd, so it is based on the revenue from February.
    - brainwad 4mo ago
      Ah, OK. It still seems reasonable they might report the number in the court affadavit with one month lag for various reasons. The root cause in the discrepancy is just that Anthropic claims to be (and appears to be) on a ridiculous tear, with +35% MoM growth. OP and Ed both seem to dismiss this as impossible, but it seems to align with Anthropic's recent desperate search for more capacity.
      - vb-8448 4mo ago
        > they might report the number in the court affadavit with one month lag for various reasons According to the article the total revenue figure in the affidavit is “to date”, so basically 8th or March.
        4mo ago
roenxi 4mo ago
Also, the revenue curve probably looks like well behaved exponential growth when Anthropic plots it out. Given that they're making speculative claims in a fast-changing environment anyway, I personally would probably cope if they included extrapolated growth in their annualised revenue figures. Not sure what the custom is, but as the article notes we're dealing with made-up numbers and wild guesses from the accountant's perspective, so it doesn't sound like there is any particular reason to just multiply the current revenue by 12 without making some basic adjustments for the growth rate they're seeing internally.
dcre 4mo ago
Weird is far too generous. It’s a travesty of thinking.
windexh8er 4mo ago
You're missing a very big part of the argument. As I understand it: in a sworn affidavit (in federal court no less) the norm is to state the tightest accurate floor. A CFO sitting on $6.7B in recognized revenue writes "exceeding $6 billion" or "approaching $7 billion," not "exceeding $5 billion." That's the basis for the 25–35% overstatement claim. This is about legal/financial language norms. It's not OK to under-represent just the same as it would not be OK to over-represent. But let's pretend this is an unusual circumstance (it's not) and that the understatement was a one time thing (it wasn't either based on past statements). So... Then you have the speedometer/odometer math. Just December 2025 through early March 2026, at Anthropic's own ARR-implied monthly rates, sums to roughly $4.25B ($750M + $750M + $1.17B + $1.58B). If lifetime revenue is barely "exceeding $5B," that leaves under ~$750M for everything before December 2025. But... Anthropic was already reporting $1B ARR in January 2025. This is the argument and "6.7 > 5" doesn't address it because now we're seeing the CFO play the other side of the coin. So no matter which way you look at it Anthropic's CFO has lied publicly and in very large numbers. You don't get to spin numbers, especially sworn numbers, in a way that benefits you. The only way that can even remotely work is that you're consistent. This is sloppy and all over the board which implies Anthropic wants to hide something.
- Ukv 4mo ago
  > You don't get to spin numbers, especially sworn numbers, in a way that benefits you If it's "a filing where Anthropic was trying to impress a federal court with its commercial scale", then wouldn't the understatement ("exceeds $5B" rather than "exceeds $6B") be to their detriment? My assumption would be that the February numbers were not yet determined when Krishna Rao was initially writing the affidavit (say, one week before its submission date, if legal review/revisions take some time), which would make "exceeds $5B" the strongest claim that could be safely made.
- brainwad 4mo ago
  > As I understand it: in a sworn affidavit (in federal court no less) the norm is to state the tightest accurate floor. All three of the numbers in the affidavit are nice round multiples of five billion dollars, so the simpler assumption might be they just rounded looser than you think? He also told the court they'd raised over $60 billion, when the precise number was actually $69.1B (as of Feb 12), so they would appear to have taken the 1 significant figure floor for the numbers in the court filing.

darkwater 4mo ago

Maybe for people used to deal with financial announcements, but from my ignorant and naive point of view, if I read that claim I think instinctively that they made $19b during the last 12 months, not that they are going to maybe make it if they keep the same rate as the last month for the next 12 months.

yen223 4mo ago
"Annualized revenue" is a projection, and is known to be a projection.
- throwaway713 4mo ago
  Interesting. I’m going to start describing my “annualized impact” in my performance self-reviews in terms of all the things I project that I’ll do.
  - fluidcruft 4mo ago
    Go for it. Be aware of what happens to your stock when expectations you set do not materialize.
    - sjsdaiuasgdia 4mo ago
      Dunno about that, somehow Tesla stock doing pretty well despite setting a lot of expectations that haven't materialized.
  - rvnx 4mo ago
    Investors don't want results anyway, they want a dream. Until the IPO which is the final boss stage where you are selling forward looking profits
- csomar 4mo ago
  The problem is, annualized revenue doesn’t work when your income has a 3 standard of deviation month to month. It is standard for other fields/businesses but these tend to have stable month to month revenue.
  - nraynaud 4mo ago
    I would venture that's it's the whole reason they use it. because it doesn't work.
    - jeeeb 4mo ago
      If anything, it’s a very conservative estimate. Short of a major turn of events it seems very unlikely Anthropic’s revenue growth is going to slow to zero.
  - dcre 4mo ago
    It’s not deviating up and down. It’s deviating upward. It is necessarily going to wildly overstate the previous 12 months’ revenue while wildly understating the next 12 months’ revenue. There is no way to describe exponential growth in a single number that doesn’t do this. This is why adults with a brain look at the series.
- qarl 4mo ago
  Yes but my mother-in-law doesn't understand it, so it's a lie.
fluidcruft 4mo ago
Wall Street be like that (and worse). Caveat emptor.
matwood 4mo ago
It's certainly not a perfect number, but what else are you going to do for a fast growing business? If it does 1B month 1, 5B month 2 and 10B month 3, how does an investor extrapolate the next 12 months? Obviously it's a forecast and will be imperfect without more data. Any potential large investor will be given more financials to help them determine if the 10B was a 1 time event or if it is actually recurring. The harder part is understanding the growth rate. The be fair to Zitron he claims that enterprise customers are likely paying up front so it won't continue in future months. But now we're into accrual for the future revenues which further complicates the analysis.
- mbreese 4mo ago
  Even if an enterprise customer was prepaying, that would only show up on a cash balance statement, not as revenue for the month it was collected in. Yes, this is based on accrual in accounting terms. But because the revenue isn’t recognized immediately, collecting prepayment in February shouldn’t skew ARR reported in March.
  - matwood 4mo ago
    Per GAAP you are correct, but many of these ARRs are qualified as non-GAAP. So yes, a real analysis should do what you're saying but are they is the question. Also, if they are buying tokens with no time limit, that will complicate the accrual forecast. This could be why all of the downstream investor companies like Amazon are pushing their employees to tokenmax.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]

vb-8448 4mo ago

"Exceeds $5b" is a weird way to say "5$b +34%" ... Don't get me wrong, I'm not a big fan of Zitron, but the narrative around revenues and profitability around AI labs are quite misleading.

brainwad 4mo ago
If you look at the table, the implied revenue for March 2026 was $1.58b. So isn't this just a case of the $5b number being from one month earlier than the $6.66b number? Ed dismisses this, but it seems to be the obvious answer - the CFO quote is from March 9, 2026, so 70% of the March 2026 revenue presumably had not yet been earnt. If you subtract that out (or even the whole month, which would also make sense), it checks out: you get something between $5.08b and $5.54b, reasonably describable as "exceeding $5b".
- vb-8448 4mo ago
  The $19b ARR is from March 3rd, so it is based on the revenue from February.
  - brainwad 4mo ago
    Ah, OK. It still seems reasonable they might report the number in the court affadavit with one month lag for various reasons. The root cause in the discrepancy is just that Anthropic claims to be (and appears to be) on a ridiculous tear, with +35% MoM growth. OP and Ed both seem to dismiss this as impossible, but it seems to align with Anthropic's recent desperate search for more capacity.
    - vb-8448 4mo ago
      > they might report the number in the court affadavit with one month lag for various reasons According to the article the total revenue figure in the affidavit is “to date”, so basically 8th or March.
      - 4mo ago

roenxi 4mo ago

Also, the revenue curve probably looks like well behaved exponential growth when Anthropic plots it out. Given that they're making speculative claims in a fast-changing environment anyway, I personally would probably cope if they included extrapolated growth in their annualised revenue figures. Not sure what the custom is, but as the article notes we're dealing with made-up numbers and wild guesses from the accountant's perspective, so it doesn't sound like there is any particular reason to just multiply the current revenue by 12 without making some basic adjustments for the growth rate they're seeing internally.

dcre 4mo ago

Weird is far too generous. It’s a travesty of thinking.

windexh8er 4mo ago

You're missing a very big part of the argument. As I understand it: in a sworn affidavit (in federal court no less) the norm is to state the tightest accurate floor. A CFO sitting on $6.7B in recognized revenue writes "exceeding $6 billion" or "approaching $7 billion," not "exceeding $5 billion." That's the basis for the 25–35% overstatement claim. This is about legal/financial language norms. It's not OK to under-represent just the same as it would not be OK to over-represent. But let's pretend this is an unusual circumstance (it's not) and that the understatement was a one time thing (it wasn't either based on past statements). So... Then you have the speedometer/odometer math. Just December 2025 through early March 2026, at Anthropic's own ARR-implied monthly rates, sums to roughly $4.25B ($750M + $750M + $1.17B + $1.58B). If lifetime revenue is barely "exceeding $5B," that leaves under ~$750M for everything before December 2025. But... Anthropic was already reporting $1B ARR in January 2025. This is the argument and "6.7 > 5" doesn't address it because now we're seeing the CFO play the other side of the coin. So no matter which way you look at it Anthropic's CFO has lied publicly and in very large numbers. You don't get to spin numbers, especially sworn numbers, in a way that benefits you. The only way that can even remotely work is that you're consistent. This is sloppy and all over the board which implies Anthropic wants to hide something.

Ukv 4mo ago
> You don't get to spin numbers, especially sworn numbers, in a way that benefits you If it's "a filing where Anthropic was trying to impress a federal court with its commercial scale", then wouldn't the understatement ("exceeds $5B" rather than "exceeds $6B") be to their detriment? My assumption would be that the February numbers were not yet determined when Krishna Rao was initially writing the affidavit (say, one week before its submission date, if legal review/revisions take some time), which would make "exceeds $5B" the strongest claim that could be safely made.
brainwad 4mo ago
> As I understand it: in a sworn affidavit (in federal court no less) the norm is to state the tightest accurate floor. All three of the numbers in the affidavit are nice round multiples of five billion dollars, so the simpler assumption might be they just rounded looser than you think? He also told the court they'd raised over $60 billion, when the precise number was actually $69.1B (as of Feb 12), so they would appear to have taken the 1 significant figure floor for the numbers in the court filing.