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> Anthropic are strongly rumored to be about to have their first profitable quarter No, its more like their own leak to WSJ and according to Ed Zitron -> seems

> Anthropic are strongly rumored to be about to have their first profitable quarter No, its more like their own leak to WSJ and according to Ed Zitron -> seems to be heavily engineered via non-GAAP practices such as counting potential, but not realised revenue as actual revenue - the stuff for which I would be arrested if I did it at my company. Also it appears according to Ed's analysis - strangely they seem to be projecting only that one quarter as profitable - potentially to calm the investors ahead of the IPO. Investor fraud anyone?

duped 5mo ago
AI companies/users are filled with liars and grifters, so any numbers/outlook they report should be highly suspect.
- bflesch 5mo ago
  There's a saying "the fish stinks from the head".
- supern0va 5mo ago
  I must admit that I am going to find it fascinating when we hit the point where it becomes nearly impossible to deny the efficacy of these tools. I have straight up had people, even in real life, suggest that I'm lying about my productivity gains or what I'm able to accomplish with them. Like, I understand the reasonable arguments against (I even agree with a few), but it's clear that some people have fully inserted their head into the sand and just don't want to believe any of this could be true. Which will be harsh, since I think getting hit with this train all at once in the future is going to be a rougher ride than a slower coming-to-terms-with, even if the result is one we're unhappy with.
  - hansmayer 5mo ago
    In the meanwhile, Google AI search still says the next year after 2026 will be 2028.
    - xboxnolifes 5mo ago
      Ok? Then don't use AI to do arithmetic. It's not their strong suit.
      - hansmayer 5mo ago
        Oh, basic counting is now arithmetic? But I was told they were superintelligent and were going to cause an apocalypse because they can do pretty much everything ? Somehow because they can excrement a lot of text, we were told they can do everything else too?
        simonw 5mo ago
        Google's "AI overviews" have been utter junk pretty much consistently since they launched the feature.
        xboxnolifes 5mo ago
        > Oh, basic counting is now arithmetic? Ye- yes? It's addition by 1.
    - anthonyrstevens 5mo ago
      No it doesn't, at least not for me.
  - duped 5mo ago
    I don't deny their efficacy, I'm saying that there's a massive crop of grifters and liars building them and using them.
    - supern0va 5mo ago
      What is the motivation for us users to lie about our experiences? It's to the degree now that people simply refuse to believe that I'm honestly describing my experiences with these tools? I understand the motivations for the labs to lie, but what do you think mine is?
      - duped 5mo ago
        Why do you deliberately misread my comments? I am not talking about your "experience."
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
pier25 5mo ago
Yeah I'll believe it when I see it. Revenue is increasing but so are their costs. Back in 2024 their CEO claimed training costs would rise to $10-100B in the next years. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/ai-models-that-cost-dollar1-billion-to-train-are-in-development-dollar100-billion-models-coming-soon-largest-current-models-take-only-dollar100-million-to-train-anthropic-ceo https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
- hansmayer 5mo ago
  Their CEO claims a lot of wild shit. He claimed in January this year, that in about 2-3 weeks from this moment, i.e. "in 6 months" that AI will be doing all of SWE work. Lets hold these people accountable for a change!
  - sampli 5mo ago
    Elon playbook
  - supern0va 5mo ago
    I work in big tech and probably 90% of code over the last month has been written by AI. And I suspect it's probably higher within Anthropic, which is probably what he's basing his opinion on. So, he's closer to correct than not. That said, your recollection is also flawed. It was in mid-March, and here's the relevant quotes: >I think we’ll be there in three to six months—where AI is writing 90 percent of the code. And then in twelve months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code. [...] >But the programmer still needs to specify, you know, what are—what are the conditions of what you’re doing, what—you know, what is the overall app you’re trying to make, what’s the overall design decision? How do we collaborate with other code that’s been written? You know, how do we have some common sense on whether this is a secure design or an insecure design? [...] >So as long as there are these small pieces that a programmer, a human programmer, needs to do, the AI isn’t good at, I think human productivity will actually be enhanced. But on the other hand, I think that eventually all those little islands will get picked off by AI systems. With another 3-4 months left on the clock, his prediction seems remarkably on point for at least certain organizations and domains. I welcome you to also hold yourself accountable in the coming months if this trend continues. ;)
surgical_fire 5mo ago
Also, if I understand correctly, they are rumored to have a profitable EBITDA. It's a funny metric considering Depreciation is a huge cost for them. "We are profitable when we don't count our expenses"
- skybrian 5mo ago
  There's a good reason to look at it separately: if inference is profitable then they make money (or at least lose less money) when they get more customers, because any fixed costs are spread across more usage.
  - surgical_fire 5mo ago
    Depreciation is part of the cost of inference. Inference happens in GPUs that have a relatively short lifespan. Those GPUs are very expensive. Inference is expensive because a GPU can only process a certain amount of requests in a given timeframe. Remember that Anthropic is constrained in compute. If they are constrained, it means that those GPUs are not idle. If they have more customers, they will need more GPUs. If they have to play silly games using EBITDA to be "profitable", then it means that they need to ramp up prices a lot more than they already did. Which is why in these discussions I always say that inference is also extremely expensive. Too many people like to pretend without any evidence that inference is cheap.
    - skybrian 5mo ago
      Anthropic and OpenAI don't own data centers. Since they're renting GPU's, that's not depreciation. Paying rent is an operating cost. Language models don't wear out the same way; upgrading is a choice.
      - ACCount37 5mo ago
        Not a real choice. You can "just not update an LLM" in theory. But if your competition updates LLMs, and gets more capable, more efficient LLMs, and you don't? They get more capable "expensive tiers", and cheaper "cheap tiers" of LLMs. What are you going to do then? Bleed userbase and die?
supern0va 5mo ago
>according to Ed Zitron So, unsourced vibes from a shady guy whose entire empire is built on being against AI? I genuinely don't know how folks can continuously buy into anything he has to say after that Wired piece. The credibility there is seriously lacking. Please, continue to be skeptical of the labs. But people need to stop talking about this dude as if he's the Holy Grail of the anti-AI movement. It's going to blow up in y'alls faces.
- hansmayer 5mo ago
  > So, unsourced vibes from a shady guy whose entire empire is built on being against AI? Actually he provides sources when he analyses stuff and imho much better than the usual corporate "Sam Altman says we should ask ChatGPT how to raise babies" crap. Also, I don't know many 'shady' guys who have built entire "empires", nor does he seem to actually have an empire. Usually being shady means you are kind of unknown and all. I am not glorifying Ed, don't even know him personally. I am not even impressed with his writing style much to be honest. But he brings important facts and information to light, which otherwise would have been lost in the cacophony of corporate media light treatment of these con-men. Holy Grail? Blowing up in our faces? WTF are you talking about?
  - supern0va 5mo ago
    >Actually he provides sources when he analyses stuff and imho much better than the usual corporate You said it was likely an internal leak to the WSJ "according to Ed Zitron". Did Ed have a source for that, or was it just vibes?
    - hansmayer 5mo ago
      The source was the article in the WSJ itself, which then referred to their source at the Anthropic. Which kind of is a textbook definition of "leak". Because otherwise Anthropic would have their lawyers hunting both the employee breaking their stringent NDA and the WSJ as well...
      - 5mo ago
cootsnuck 5mo ago
Also it was but a few months ago that their CFO said, in a court filing, that Anthropic's revenue across the entire lifetime of the company "exceeds $5 billion". Pretty strange. https://www.reuters.com/commentary/breakingviews/anthropic-gives-lesson-ai-revenue-hallucination-2026-03-10/ https://www.reuters.com/commentary/breakingviews/anthropic-g...
- jonas21 5mo ago
  How is it strange? The "exceeds $5B" quote was from December 2025. Anthropic has seen tremendous growth since then, ever since Claude Code with Opus 4.5 got really good at coding. If you've ever been at a startup, this is exactly what it looks like when you go from not having product-market fit to having it (though with a few extra zeros on the end compared to most).
  - hansmayer 5mo ago
    Ah yes, December 2025...such a long, long time ago...
    - enraged_camel 5mo ago
      Your comment is not a serious one. Their revenue has quadrupled in just a few months. So yes, December 2025 is a long time ago now.
      - hansmayer 5mo ago
        > Their revenue has quadrupled in just a few months Maybe, maybe not. We haven't seen that S-1 yet. All we have is the 5B in lifetime so far. PLUS - revenue quadrupled or not, it only matters if their costs did not expand at the same rate or more. Revenue is not profit.
        aspenmartin 5mo ago
        OK, so when S-1 comes out you will finally allow yourself to be wrong? Your prior is, a 1T company plans to IPO and their leader has been loudly committing an insane amount of fraud? I mean this of course is possible but that is quite the conspiracy. The scrutiny of an IPO would be a crazy thing to do if you were committing fraud at the scale you're suggesting. Revenue is not profit yet the discussion in this particular thread is about revenue.
downrightmike 5mo ago
Bubble popped when they increased prices. IPO may help cover some of the costs, but AI is very elastic and can be swapped out for any other company second to second. Which is why I think they bought up ram and disks like they did, to starve out competition and local models.
- grttq 5mo ago
  Correct. That’s exactly right. The move to buy up ram is straight out of a industrial organisation textbook.
  - downrightmike 5mo ago
    It was the root concession that scale will not solve AGI
peteforde 5mo ago
Ed is a smart guy, but you or anyone basing your opinion on what one eloquent journalist says is ultimately a risky bet, no matter how much his reporting hits your particular dopamine receptors. Please don't forget that Ed's entire brand identity is now 1:1 with exposing "AI" as a giant, unmitigated failure. That's a very specific flow chart to hook your caboose to when none of this is even remotely close to endgame.
- yogthos 5mo ago
  We don't have to take Ed's word for it. Anybody who's capable of doing grade school math can see that the numbers simply don't work. These companies are literally spending orders of magnitude more money than they're actually bringing in. Cursor, who've been renting Claude, estimated just recently that a $200-per-month Claude Code subscription could use up to $2,000 in compute. https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/03/05/cursor-goes-to-war-for-ai-coding-dominance/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/03/05/cursor-goes...
  - simonw 5mo ago
    Interesting story. Here's what it says: > According to a person familiar with the company’s internal analysis, Cursor estimated last year that a $200-per-month Claude Code subscription could use up to $2,000 in compute, suggesting significant subsidization by Anthropic. Today, that subsidization appears to be even more aggressive, with that $200 plan able to consume about $5,000 in compute, according to a different person who has seen analyses on the company’s compute spend patterns. The load-bearing detail here is if that means $2,000 of internal server+electricity costs, or $2,000 if they were to charge at their API pricing instead of the subscription cost. The latter is how I understand these things to work right now. If it's the former then yeah, Anthropic are losing a TON of money on those subscriptions.
    - yogthos 5mo ago
      That's the big question, and nobody really knows what the operating costs actually are right now.

duped 5mo ago

AI companies/users are filled with liars and grifters, so any numbers/outlook they report should be highly suspect.

bflesch 5mo ago
There's a saying "the fish stinks from the head".
supern0va 5mo ago
I must admit that I am going to find it fascinating when we hit the point where it becomes nearly impossible to deny the efficacy of these tools. I have straight up had people, even in real life, suggest that I'm lying about my productivity gains or what I'm able to accomplish with them. Like, I understand the reasonable arguments against (I even agree with a few), but it's clear that some people have fully inserted their head into the sand and just don't want to believe any of this could be true. Which will be harsh, since I think getting hit with this train all at once in the future is going to be a rougher ride than a slower coming-to-terms-with, even if the result is one we're unhappy with.
- hansmayer 5mo ago
  In the meanwhile, Google AI search still says the next year after 2026 will be 2028.
  - xboxnolifes 5mo ago
    Ok? Then don't use AI to do arithmetic. It's not their strong suit.
    - hansmayer 5mo ago
      Oh, basic counting is now arithmetic? But I was told they were superintelligent and were going to cause an apocalypse because they can do pretty much everything ? Somehow because they can excrement a lot of text, we were told they can do everything else too?
      - simonw 5mo ago
        Google's "AI overviews" have been utter junk pretty much consistently since they launched the feature.
      - xboxnolifes 5mo ago
        > Oh, basic counting is now arithmetic? Ye- yes? It's addition by 1.
  - anthonyrstevens 5mo ago
    No it doesn't, at least not for me.
- duped 5mo ago
  I don't deny their efficacy, I'm saying that there's a massive crop of grifters and liars building them and using them.
  - supern0va 5mo ago
    What is the motivation for us users to lie about our experiences? It's to the degree now that people simply refuse to believe that I'm honestly describing my experiences with these tools? I understand the motivations for the labs to lie, but what do you think mine is?
    - duped 5mo ago
      Why do you deliberately misread my comments? I am not talking about your "experience."
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]

pier25 5mo ago

Yeah I'll believe it when I see it. Revenue is increasing but so are their costs. Back in 2024 their CEO claimed training costs would rise to $10-100B in the next years. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/ai-models-that-cost-dollar1-billion-to-train-are-in-development-dollar100-billion-models-coming-soon-largest-current-models-take-only-dollar100-million-to-train-anthropic-ceo https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

hansmayer 5mo ago
Their CEO claims a lot of wild shit. He claimed in January this year, that in about 2-3 weeks from this moment, i.e. "in 6 months" that AI will be doing all of SWE work. Lets hold these people accountable for a change!
- sampli 5mo ago
  Elon playbook
- supern0va 5mo ago
  I work in big tech and probably 90% of code over the last month has been written by AI. And I suspect it's probably higher within Anthropic, which is probably what he's basing his opinion on. So, he's closer to correct than not. That said, your recollection is also flawed. It was in mid-March, and here's the relevant quotes: >I think we’ll be there in three to six months—where AI is writing 90 percent of the code. And then in twelve months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code. [...] >But the programmer still needs to specify, you know, what are—what are the conditions of what you’re doing, what—you know, what is the overall app you’re trying to make, what’s the overall design decision? How do we collaborate with other code that’s been written? You know, how do we have some common sense on whether this is a secure design or an insecure design? [...] >So as long as there are these small pieces that a programmer, a human programmer, needs to do, the AI isn’t good at, I think human productivity will actually be enhanced. But on the other hand, I think that eventually all those little islands will get picked off by AI systems. With another 3-4 months left on the clock, his prediction seems remarkably on point for at least certain organizations and domains. I welcome you to also hold yourself accountable in the coming months if this trend continues. ;)

surgical_fire 5mo ago

Also, if I understand correctly, they are rumored to have a profitable EBITDA. It's a funny metric considering Depreciation is a huge cost for them. "We are profitable when we don't count our expenses"

skybrian 5mo ago
There's a good reason to look at it separately: if inference is profitable then they make money (or at least lose less money) when they get more customers, because any fixed costs are spread across more usage.
- surgical_fire 5mo ago
  Depreciation is part of the cost of inference. Inference happens in GPUs that have a relatively short lifespan. Those GPUs are very expensive. Inference is expensive because a GPU can only process a certain amount of requests in a given timeframe. Remember that Anthropic is constrained in compute. If they are constrained, it means that those GPUs are not idle. If they have more customers, they will need more GPUs. If they have to play silly games using EBITDA to be "profitable", then it means that they need to ramp up prices a lot more than they already did. Which is why in these discussions I always say that inference is also extremely expensive. Too many people like to pretend without any evidence that inference is cheap.
  - skybrian 5mo ago
    Anthropic and OpenAI don't own data centers. Since they're renting GPU's, that's not depreciation. Paying rent is an operating cost. Language models don't wear out the same way; upgrading is a choice.
    - ACCount37 5mo ago
      Not a real choice. You can "just not update an LLM" in theory. But if your competition updates LLMs, and gets more capable, more efficient LLMs, and you don't? They get more capable "expensive tiers", and cheaper "cheap tiers" of LLMs. What are you going to do then? Bleed userbase and die?

supern0va 5mo ago

>according to Ed Zitron So, unsourced vibes from a shady guy whose entire empire is built on being against AI? I genuinely don't know how folks can continuously buy into anything he has to say after that Wired piece. The credibility there is seriously lacking. Please, continue to be skeptical of the labs. But people need to stop talking about this dude as if he's the Holy Grail of the anti-AI movement. It's going to blow up in y'alls faces.

hansmayer 5mo ago
> So, unsourced vibes from a shady guy whose entire empire is built on being against AI? Actually he provides sources when he analyses stuff and imho much better than the usual corporate "Sam Altman says we should ask ChatGPT how to raise babies" crap. Also, I don't know many 'shady' guys who have built entire "empires", nor does he seem to actually have an empire. Usually being shady means you are kind of unknown and all. I am not glorifying Ed, don't even know him personally. I am not even impressed with his writing style much to be honest. But he brings important facts and information to light, which otherwise would have been lost in the cacophony of corporate media light treatment of these con-men. Holy Grail? Blowing up in our faces? WTF are you talking about?
- supern0va 5mo ago
  >Actually he provides sources when he analyses stuff and imho much better than the usual corporate You said it was likely an internal leak to the WSJ "according to Ed Zitron". Did Ed have a source for that, or was it just vibes?
  - hansmayer 5mo ago
    The source was the article in the WSJ itself, which then referred to their source at the Anthropic. Which kind of is a textbook definition of "leak". Because otherwise Anthropic would have their lawyers hunting both the employee breaking their stringent NDA and the WSJ as well...
    - 5mo ago

cootsnuck 5mo ago

Also it was but a few months ago that their CFO said, in a court filing, that Anthropic's revenue across the entire lifetime of the company "exceeds $5 billion". Pretty strange. https://www.reuters.com/commentary/breakingviews/anthropic-gives-lesson-ai-revenue-hallucination-2026-03-10/ https://www.reuters.com/commentary/breakingviews/anthropic-g...

jonas21 5mo ago
How is it strange? The "exceeds $5B" quote was from December 2025. Anthropic has seen tremendous growth since then, ever since Claude Code with Opus 4.5 got really good at coding. If you've ever been at a startup, this is exactly what it looks like when you go from not having product-market fit to having it (though with a few extra zeros on the end compared to most).
- hansmayer 5mo ago
  Ah yes, December 2025...such a long, long time ago...
  - enraged_camel 5mo ago
    Your comment is not a serious one. Their revenue has quadrupled in just a few months. So yes, December 2025 is a long time ago now.
    - hansmayer 5mo ago
      > Their revenue has quadrupled in just a few months Maybe, maybe not. We haven't seen that S-1 yet. All we have is the 5B in lifetime so far. PLUS - revenue quadrupled or not, it only matters if their costs did not expand at the same rate or more. Revenue is not profit.
      - aspenmartin 5mo ago
        OK, so when S-1 comes out you will finally allow yourself to be wrong? Your prior is, a 1T company plans to IPO and their leader has been loudly committing an insane amount of fraud? I mean this of course is possible but that is quite the conspiracy. The scrutiny of an IPO would be a crazy thing to do if you were committing fraud at the scale you're suggesting. Revenue is not profit yet the discussion in this particular thread is about revenue.

downrightmike 5mo ago

Bubble popped when they increased prices. IPO may help cover some of the costs, but AI is very elastic and can be swapped out for any other company second to second. Which is why I think they bought up ram and disks like they did, to starve out competition and local models.

grttq 5mo ago
Correct. That’s exactly right. The move to buy up ram is straight out of a industrial organisation textbook.
- downrightmike 5mo ago
  It was the root concession that scale will not solve AGI

peteforde 5mo ago

Ed is a smart guy, but you or anyone basing your opinion on what one eloquent journalist says is ultimately a risky bet, no matter how much his reporting hits your particular dopamine receptors. Please don't forget that Ed's entire brand identity is now 1:1 with exposing "AI" as a giant, unmitigated failure. That's a very specific flow chart to hook your caboose to when none of this is even remotely close to endgame.

yogthos 5mo ago
We don't have to take Ed's word for it. Anybody who's capable of doing grade school math can see that the numbers simply don't work. These companies are literally spending orders of magnitude more money than they're actually bringing in. Cursor, who've been renting Claude, estimated just recently that a $200-per-month Claude Code subscription could use up to $2,000 in compute. https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/03/05/cursor-goes-to-war-for-ai-coding-dominance/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/03/05/cursor-goes...
- simonw 5mo ago
  Interesting story. Here's what it says: > According to a person familiar with the company’s internal analysis, Cursor estimated last year that a $200-per-month Claude Code subscription could use up to $2,000 in compute, suggesting significant subsidization by Anthropic. Today, that subsidization appears to be even more aggressive, with that $200 plan able to consume about $5,000 in compute, according to a different person who has seen analyses on the company’s compute spend patterns. The load-bearing detail here is if that means $2,000 of internal server+electricity costs, or $2,000 if they were to charge at their API pricing instead of the subscription cost. The latter is how I understand these things to work right now. If it's the former then yeah, Anthropic are losing a TON of money on those subscriptions.
  - yogthos 5mo ago
    That's the big question, and nobody really knows what the operating costs actually are right now.