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What’s defensible about Anthropic’s revenue? It seems like OpenAI and others are equivalent. Open weight models are catching up. Google has ads networks, video

What’s defensible about Anthropic’s revenue? It seems like OpenAI and others are equivalent. Open weight models are catching up. Google has ads networks, video platforms, and so much more. I am skeptical that Anthropic and OpenAI can defend their dominance for long enough to make meaningful gaap accounted profits

giancarlostoro 4mo ago
Anthropic is profitable unlike OpenAI though. Sure they'll owe a lot of money for probably decades, but if they remain profitable moving forward, it will be worthwhile.
- georgemcbay 4mo ago
  The question still remains whether they will be defensively profitable when things settle down. I don't think open weight models are likely to overtake or match frontier models in the next year or so when it comes to doing the most difficult tasks, but I do expect a lot of people who are currently funneling wheelbarrows of money to Anthropic to realize that they can achieve the vast majority of things they are doing with LLMs just as well with much cheaper open weight models.
  - giancarlostoro 4mo ago
    That is 100% valid, and I don't disagree.
- SilverElfin 4mo ago
  That profit figure is a pre IPO marketing claim, not an audited and GAAP accounted number. And there is already a lot written about how Anthropic exaggerated revenue compared to OpenAI. https://www.forbes.com/sites/josipamajic/2026/03/25/openai-and-anthropic-count-revenue-differently-and-investors-are-looking-into-it/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/josipamajic/2026/03/25/openai-a...
  - jraby3 4mo ago
    This seems like it's because openAI actually partnered with Microsoft and has to give them 20% of their revenue. Anthropic isn't partnering with their cloud providers so it makes sense to me they count top line revenue and then give Amazon payment as an expense. Also the numbers seem pretty minor compared to anthropic $49B run rate. The article mentioned an openAI payment of around $500M.
Spooky23 4mo ago
Anthropic seems to have clawed its way to being the best AI and charging for itself. Microsoft had to slash the Anthropic budget… which it exceeded while being the exclusive host of OpenAI. Google seems to have a good B2B and internal leveraging AI to make $. OpenAI/Microsoft seems to have squandered an early product lead. And then you have the Muskiverse, where we have an rocket ship company that buys surplus cyber trucks, operates a space ISP, an AI company that produces virtual fetish porn and makes money renting GPUs to Anthropic, a rando dying social network and a tunnel company to cock-block public transit. I may be underestimating the market for AI anime porn, but I think Anthropic is probably the best in class product right now. Google and AWS are probably the best positioned sellers of AI. SpaceXAI is the dark horse because they are likely enriching the dear leader more. OpenAI is fucked.
- AlexCoventry 4mo ago
  > an AI company that produces virtual fetish porn and makes money renting GPUs to Anthropic Whatever Anthropic is paying is too much, since it means xAI will get to observe Anthropic's software, weights and operations in detail. It's probably contractually prohibited from doing so, but I doubt that would stop Musk, given what's at stake.
  - 0123456789ABCDE 4mo ago
    seems to be a well understood angle inside anthropic — colossus use expands subscriber capacity; training goes to aws/gcp https://x.ai/news/anthropic-compute-partnership https://x.ai/news/anthropic-compute-partnership https://www.anthropic.com/news/higher-limits-spacex https://www.anthropic.com/news/higher-limits-spacex
coliveira 4mo ago
They will defend it the way any good monopoly always does: buying the competition. Case in point is Facebook: it is just a social network, the way they really stay on top is buying other companies and paying for people to spend even more time on their properties.
- jraby3 4mo ago
  They bought insta and WhatsApp but at the time neither were really social networks. Insta was a popular filtering app. WhatsApp is just recently turning into a social network with their status updates.
  - coliveira 4mo ago
    That's a completely revisionist take. These apps were seen as the next wave of social networks that would compete with Facebook when it bought them.
vb-8448 4mo ago
I think their real moat is the grip they have in corporates. Once they are in, they will catch most of the opportunities.
smithza 4mo ago
Open weights are only valuable to people who have access to expensive hardware to run them on. Treating Anthropic as a service that lets you rent such hardware (there are multiple products that a single token operates on) is also where Anthropics investment and reinvestment applies.

giancarlostoro 4mo ago

Anthropic is profitable unlike OpenAI though. Sure they'll owe a lot of money for probably decades, but if they remain profitable moving forward, it will be worthwhile.

georgemcbay 4mo ago
The question still remains whether they will be defensively profitable when things settle down. I don't think open weight models are likely to overtake or match frontier models in the next year or so when it comes to doing the most difficult tasks, but I do expect a lot of people who are currently funneling wheelbarrows of money to Anthropic to realize that they can achieve the vast majority of things they are doing with LLMs just as well with much cheaper open weight models.
- giancarlostoro 4mo ago
  That is 100% valid, and I don't disagree.
SilverElfin 4mo ago
That profit figure is a pre IPO marketing claim, not an audited and GAAP accounted number. And there is already a lot written about how Anthropic exaggerated revenue compared to OpenAI. https://www.forbes.com/sites/josipamajic/2026/03/25/openai-and-anthropic-count-revenue-differently-and-investors-are-looking-into-it/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/josipamajic/2026/03/25/openai-a...
- jraby3 4mo ago
  This seems like it's because openAI actually partnered with Microsoft and has to give them 20% of their revenue. Anthropic isn't partnering with their cloud providers so it makes sense to me they count top line revenue and then give Amazon payment as an expense. Also the numbers seem pretty minor compared to anthropic $49B run rate. The article mentioned an openAI payment of around $500M.

Spooky23 4mo ago

Anthropic seems to have clawed its way to being the best AI and charging for itself. Microsoft had to slash the Anthropic budget… which it exceeded while being the exclusive host of OpenAI. Google seems to have a good B2B and internal leveraging AI to make $. OpenAI/Microsoft seems to have squandered an early product lead. And then you have the Muskiverse, where we have an rocket ship company that buys surplus cyber trucks, operates a space ISP, an AI company that produces virtual fetish porn and makes money renting GPUs to Anthropic, a rando dying social network and a tunnel company to cock-block public transit. I may be underestimating the market for AI anime porn, but I think Anthropic is probably the best in class product right now. Google and AWS are probably the best positioned sellers of AI. SpaceXAI is the dark horse because they are likely enriching the dear leader more. OpenAI is fucked.

AlexCoventry 4mo ago
> an AI company that produces virtual fetish porn and makes money renting GPUs to Anthropic Whatever Anthropic is paying is too much, since it means xAI will get to observe Anthropic's software, weights and operations in detail. It's probably contractually prohibited from doing so, but I doubt that would stop Musk, given what's at stake.
- 0123456789ABCDE 4mo ago
  seems to be a well understood angle inside anthropic — colossus use expands subscriber capacity; training goes to aws/gcp https://x.ai/news/anthropic-compute-partnership https://x.ai/news/anthropic-compute-partnership https://www.anthropic.com/news/higher-limits-spacex https://www.anthropic.com/news/higher-limits-spacex

coliveira 4mo ago

They will defend it the way any good monopoly always does: buying the competition. Case in point is Facebook: it is just a social network, the way they really stay on top is buying other companies and paying for people to spend even more time on their properties.

jraby3 4mo ago
They bought insta and WhatsApp but at the time neither were really social networks. Insta was a popular filtering app. WhatsApp is just recently turning into a social network with their status updates.
- coliveira 4mo ago
  That's a completely revisionist take. These apps were seen as the next wave of social networks that would compete with Facebook when it bought them.

vb-8448 4mo ago

I think their real moat is the grip they have in corporates. Once they are in, they will catch most of the opportunities.

smithza 4mo ago

Open weights are only valuable to people who have access to expensive hardware to run them on. Treating Anthropic as a service that lets you rent such hardware (there are multiple products that a single token operates on) is also where Anthropics investment and reinvestment applies.