Comment by weakfish
4 hours ago
I don't have access to the article linked, but I am default skeptical of any self-reported numbers. They have a financial incentive to play it up.
If you're able to link something non-paywalled, I'd be happy to read thru.
You can beat the paywalls with https://archive.ph or similar.
They may be self-reported numbers, but they're consistent across multiple reporting sources. If Anthropic are lying to their investors about these numbers they will be in very real trouble with the SEC come IPO time.
And even if they're using funky accounting tricks to exaggerate their profits and downplay some of their losses, I expect the numbers for 2026 will still be really impressive.
I'll check w/ archive.ph in a bit, thanks for the tip.
Is the hope for them that they'll outpace their run with a massive revenue growth? I believe that they have that, but numbers like a net loss of $46b in 2025[0] seem hard to overcome.
Re: self-reporting, I'd be inclined to think they're using non-GAAP practices to make it sound more favorable, but I am by no means an expert, so willing to believe I am wrong.
I'll read the article you sent; this is just my off-the-cuff thinking.
They claim to have been profitable in both Q2 and Q3 (under whatever their definition of profitability is).
I really don't think the 2025 figures are interesting at this point. Everything changed for them in 2026 - nobody was spending $1000/month/employee in 2025, there wasn't enough interesting token-heavy stuff to do with the models.
I think Anthropic might actually make it to profitability - they're earning more revenue than OpenAI and they've spent significantly less, too.