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If they were profitable, they'd release real numbers and announce concrete plans for an IPO. They are very obviously not profitable; they just announced a $65B

If they were profitable, they'd release real numbers and announce concrete plans for an IPO. They are very obviously not profitable; they just announced a $65B Series H two months ago. They're almost literally setting money on fire.

tristanj 2mo ago
Utterly false -- review the numbers yourself https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-propel-anthropic-into-its-first-profitable-quarter-7edbf2f4 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-... https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/anthropic-3q26-profit-over-1b-the https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/anthropic-3q26-profit-... The company was profitable in Q2 and is projected to exceed $1B in profit in Q3.
- stackskipton 2mo ago
  I can't read the first article 100% but it's linked here: https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle... which I noted in my original post seems to be full of juiced numbers. Second link talks about revenue and operating costs. Again, it's very possible that Anthropic is profitable as I hinted looking at pure revenue vs operating costs. That's like saying your delivery service is profitable because you are only looking at the cost of drivers + gas and ignoring maintenance, car purchases and building of garages to get you to that point. Again, the poster you replied to is right. If they are extremely profitable, the logical thing is file S-1 publicly and IPO. The fact they haven't done so is interesting.
  - tristanj 2mo ago
    1) Ed Zitron has one of the worst track records in the AI space. He's consistently wrong about everything. Every major prediction he has made over the past five years has aged terribly. 2) After calling the doom of OpenAI and Anthropic for half a decade, Zitron pivoted this year into accusing these companies of financial engineering and fraud. I have read the "article" you linked and he makes this accusation with no evidence backing it up. 3) I intentionally did not address your "delivery service" example because it is financially illiterate. Per the first section of the links provided (which you can read without paywall), Anthropic is EBITDA profitable. EBITDA profitability implies the company has positive gross margins AND is operational profitable, which means the company is profitable under your fictitious "delivery service" scenario. 4) Claiming a profitable company must immediately file an S-1 and IPO is a non-sequitur. Thousands of large, highly profitable companies choose to stay private for strategic reasons. 5) Did you casually forget the fact that Anthropic is currently in the process of going public? They already filed a draft S-1 with the SEC. They're planning an IPO this October. Having gone through an IPO myself, it takes over a year of preparation for an IPO. The slow timeline is completely normal for a company of their size.
    - InsideOutSanta 2mo ago
      Anthropic has not released an official EBITDA figure.
      - saberience 2mo ago
        It’s a not very well kept secret in the industry that Anthropic has been profitable for some time now and there are margins are only getting better. We knew they were maybe at 30-40% margin a few months ago but now it’s looking like they are operating at more like 70-80% margin. The new Nvidia chips and the improved inference stack is only making this situation better for them.
        InsideOutSanta 2mo ago
        > It’s a not very well kept secret in the industry I would rather say it's been a very well kept secret if it's true, which I highly doubt. It also makes absolutely no sense; so far, Anthropic has taken every opportunity they had to release good numbers. Why would they keep it secret if they were wildly profitable? None of this makes any sense. The only thing that makes sense is that Anthropic isn't profitable at all, and is burning investor money to stay afloat. Else, why keep raising tens of billions and only release vague annualized numbers? Genuinely, this makes no sense at all. If you want to convince people otherwise, you need more than just "oh, it's a secret, but we all know it."
        hakimg 2mo ago
        Sorry but your whole argument that Anthropic must be burning cash is extremely weak and falls into the same tropes as Zitron. We can actually get a very good approximation of the gross margin Anthropic sells their models over API by estimating model sizes which is pretty easy with comparible open source models and analysis points to 80-90% margins. It also make sense for Anthropic to be profitable whilst raising large amounts of capital. This is because we're in a regime where just deploying GPU compute provides a huge upside and also demand for that compute has been relentless. Given that Anthropics best move would be to expand as fast as possible which requires raising capital as otherwise their organic growth would be far to slow.
- InsideOutSanta 2mo ago
  Not a single thing in my comment is false.

tristanj 2mo ago

Utterly false -- review the numbers yourself https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-propel-anthropic-into-its-first-profitable-quarter-7edbf2f4 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-... https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/anthropic-3q26-profit-over-1b-the https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/anthropic-3q26-profit-... The company was profitable in Q2 and is projected to exceed $1B in profit in Q3.

stackskipton 2mo ago
I can't read the first article 100% but it's linked here: https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle... which I noted in my original post seems to be full of juiced numbers. Second link talks about revenue and operating costs. Again, it's very possible that Anthropic is profitable as I hinted looking at pure revenue vs operating costs. That's like saying your delivery service is profitable because you are only looking at the cost of drivers + gas and ignoring maintenance, car purchases and building of garages to get you to that point. Again, the poster you replied to is right. If they are extremely profitable, the logical thing is file S-1 publicly and IPO. The fact they haven't done so is interesting.
- tristanj 2mo ago
  1) Ed Zitron has one of the worst track records in the AI space. He's consistently wrong about everything. Every major prediction he has made over the past five years has aged terribly. 2) After calling the doom of OpenAI and Anthropic for half a decade, Zitron pivoted this year into accusing these companies of financial engineering and fraud. I have read the "article" you linked and he makes this accusation with no evidence backing it up. 3) I intentionally did not address your "delivery service" example because it is financially illiterate. Per the first section of the links provided (which you can read without paywall), Anthropic is EBITDA profitable. EBITDA profitability implies the company has positive gross margins AND is operational profitable, which means the company is profitable under your fictitious "delivery service" scenario. 4) Claiming a profitable company must immediately file an S-1 and IPO is a non-sequitur. Thousands of large, highly profitable companies choose to stay private for strategic reasons. 5) Did you casually forget the fact that Anthropic is currently in the process of going public? They already filed a draft S-1 with the SEC. They're planning an IPO this October. Having gone through an IPO myself, it takes over a year of preparation for an IPO. The slow timeline is completely normal for a company of their size.
  - InsideOutSanta 2mo ago
    Anthropic has not released an official EBITDA figure.
    - saberience 2mo ago
      It’s a not very well kept secret in the industry that Anthropic has been profitable for some time now and there are margins are only getting better. We knew they were maybe at 30-40% margin a few months ago but now it’s looking like they are operating at more like 70-80% margin. The new Nvidia chips and the improved inference stack is only making this situation better for them.
      - InsideOutSanta 2mo ago
        > It’s a not very well kept secret in the industry I would rather say it's been a very well kept secret if it's true, which I highly doubt. It also makes absolutely no sense; so far, Anthropic has taken every opportunity they had to release good numbers. Why would they keep it secret if they were wildly profitable? None of this makes any sense. The only thing that makes sense is that Anthropic isn't profitable at all, and is burning investor money to stay afloat. Else, why keep raising tens of billions and only release vague annualized numbers? Genuinely, this makes no sense at all. If you want to convince people otherwise, you need more than just "oh, it's a secret, but we all know it."
        hakimg 2mo ago
        Sorry but your whole argument that Anthropic must be burning cash is extremely weak and falls into the same tropes as Zitron. We can actually get a very good approximation of the gross margin Anthropic sells their models over API by estimating model sizes which is pretty easy with comparible open source models and analysis points to 80-90% margins. It also make sense for Anthropic to be profitable whilst raising large amounts of capital. This is because we're in a regime where just deploying GPU compute provides a huge upside and also demand for that compute has been relentless. Given that Anthropics best move would be to expand as fast as possible which requires raising capital as otherwise their organic growth would be far to slow.
InsideOutSanta 2mo ago
Not a single thing in my comment is false.