Comment by energy123
11 hours ago
But we don't have visibility on the COGS until they IPO and file, right? So where is all this premature judgement coming from about their unit economics?
(not pointing the finger only at you, at least you identified that gross margins is the correct thing to look at rather than net profit!)
> But we don't have visibility on the COGS until they IPO and file, right? So where is all this premature judgement coming from about their unit economics?
It's the lack of visibility that causes the judgement; Were the numbers good, it's quite unlikely that Anthropic would be so reluctant to share them.
Were it just Anthropic doing this, it's not much evidence. But it's EVERYONE that obfuscates their numbers, even the publicly traded companies.
Why would Amazon and Microsoft obfuscate the revenues and costs of their AI products? Even their cloud numbers are less clear than desired. And beyond those two, why would the datacenter companies obfuscate their numbers, when everyone desperately needs them to raise debt and investment to build more DCs?
Pretty much the only company showing clear numbers is Nvidia & GPU orders. But immediately beyond that, it's all obfuscated. How many GPUs are sitting in datacenters? They ain't telling.
Isn't it illegal for publicly traded companies to hide such information from their shareholders? What do you mean by "obfuscated"? The numbers are disclosed, but you think they're unclear somehow?
It'd be illegal if they overtly lie.
But what they can (and do) do is structure (in the not financial jargon sense) the reports such that the given datapoint does not exist individually.
E.g. If you want to hide AI revenues or costs, the SEC won't let you just _not report them_, but you can just group the AI revenues with the SaaS/Cloud numbers under a new division, and report only the combined figure for that division.
This works especially well if the grouped components already fluctuate a bit, so one cannot simply substract known SaaS/Cloud numbers from the new total.
I think a lot of us are calling it out because it's a contrast to SaaS/ads businesses where incremental goods sold are practically free compared to R&D, so spending can be looked at as one-time investments. There's very little additional COGS per additional customer in those businesses, so the default assumption to treat AI like other tech businesses has a blind spot.