Comment by hansmayer
1 day ago
> 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?
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-g...
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).
Ah yes, December 2025...such a long, long time ago...
14 replies →
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.
Pretty much. Ed does a lot of great work in digging through all this stuff but his conclusions always feel far too doomer oriented. OpenAL should have closed 5 times by now if you have been following his assertations from the start.
There will be big parts of what he says are true once the rubble settles but it will not be anywhere near what he is predicting. How that will shape out may not be great for the average person, what money shuffling tricks will be used? But it won't be a total wreck.
> It won't be a total wreck.
Honestly, I think it's very short-sighted to assume that all of this will be seen as any kind of wreck in the long term.
Normies are still catching up and reacting to chat-based LLMs.
HN types are further ahead of the curve, but still catching up and reacting to agentic coding and design workflows.
What often gets completely ignored is that entirely new modalities for how the underlying tech can be applied will continue to be demonstrated, and those will once again cause new ripples of excitement and disgust.
There are companies building world models and systems for protein discovery. Comparatively speaking, these approaches are barely in the zeitgeist today.
Deciding that we already have the data points we need to extrapolate how all of this plays out is like someone in 1974 deciding that microprocessors are just for accounting and inventory. Don't be that someone.
3 replies →
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...
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.
3 replies →
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"
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.
Assuming that there are infinite suckers with cash to spend. It's entirely possible (if unlikely) that the market is not big enough to cover the training costs. Especially for multiple companies all burning insane amount of money on the regular.
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.
6 replies →
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.
Correct. That’s exactly right.
The move to buy up ram is straight out of a industrial organisation textbook.
It was the root concession that scale will not solve AGI
AI companies/users are filled with liars and grifters, so any numbers/outlook they report should be highly suspect.
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.
I don't deny their efficacy, I'm saying that there's a massive crop of grifters and liars building them and using them.
In the meanwhile, Google AI search still says the next year after 2026 will be 2028.
4 replies →
There's a saying "the fish stinks from the head".
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-intell...
thats not that far off. Costs like $100Ms to train a frontier coding agent model today, billions if you count the full pipeline. Combine that with the infra we're building out, the fact that you have multiple labs building similar scaled models, the industry-wide costs of training frontier models could easily surpass 10B/yr in 2027
Yes, when he made that claim back in 2024 they were spending like $100M to train a model.
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!
> "in 6 months" that AI will be doing all of SWE work
I assume this is the quote you're referring to from Davos?
"I have engineers within Anthropic who say I don’t write any code anymore. I just let the model write the code, I edit it. I do the things around it… we might be six to twelve months away from when the model is doing most, maybe all of what SWEs do end to end."
that was in Jan, he said "might" and he said 6-12 months. Yes! Let's hold him accountable for saying reasonable things!
7 replies →
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. ;)
14 replies →
Elon playbook
>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.
Ed actually provides sources and goes into an incredible amount of detail as to how he came to his conclusions. The average AI booster just goes "I totally built ten businesses off vibe coding but I can't tell you anything because it's a SECRET!". And the mainstream tech media is so in the pocket of big tech and AI corporations that they might as well just publish their PR emails at this point. Yeah, I'll listen to Ed thank you very much.
I think it's telling that most critics don't address his actual points, but instead his credibility because he's a "hater".
Ed actually seems to make some really serious errors in his work. Tim Lee called out a particularly egregious one here, though it's one of many: https://x.com/binarybits/status/2050562429709377986
That said, I really mean it when I say that I don't actually think Ed is a good choice for the anti-AI movement. I think an actual opposition is useful, but he ain't it.
I really recommend you read the Wired profile if you haven't yet and form your own opinion: https://www.wired.com/story/ai-pr-ed-zitron-profile/
1 reply →
> 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?
>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?
4 replies →
[dead]