If the unit economics look great (my understanding is they're at least fine-to-good), then they should not be taking profit because it is very much in their interest to do capex to grow their capacity so that they can continue to grow.
It's a knife's edge because if they invest too aggressively it could lead to bankruptcy, but so far they've actually been quite conservative and given their unit economics they can afford to pay $$$$ for expensive inference compute (and indeed that's why they've inked a bunch of deals in the past month or two)
You can take small profit now or much larger profit later. Insisting that companies need to be profitable even when growing revenue rapidly is failing the marshmallow test.
If you give me $100, I will give you back $101, funded by equity raises.
Very high growth, very high revenue, huge customer satisfaction.
We hope to be profitable one day, already foresee a mechanism to double profitability per transaction and also double the number of transactions our customers perform.
Please let me know if you are keen to invest.
Given that they just filed a (confidential) S-1, we will get an answer soon enough.
I expect it's going to look a bit more like selling 38 billion dollars for 40 billion in revenue^ than your example.
^ Some other caveats about how they're marking their p&l, but I think if the growth continues and they have a durable moat^^ then this will look like Amazon and be able to pivot into higher margin stuff
^^ haha this is the biggest condition, but I'm optimistic
(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!)
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.
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.
1. Continuing to grow their share of the market.
2. Margins staying high.
3. Inference costs coming down.
4. A need for Anthropic's models specifically.
I buy 3. But 1, 2, and 4 rely on models continuing to improve at the same rate, such that you need the latest version to stay competitive. At the cut below frontier models, there's already robust competition between open source models, cheaper providers like Deepseek, more local AI alternatives, etc.
I think the case for the unit economics being fine starts to fall apart if you can't charge a large premium for your best in class model.
If a system can perform or positively augment the work done by a human, especially knowledge workers, then it’s got value, it’s just quite hard to put a finger on what the extent of that value is even now, let alone next month.
Then why IPO? Isn't that even shorter term thinking?
* For now, when they don't have to compete much against companies like DeepSeek who supplies inference at 1/10th of the cost
There is no source for this. Amodei just pulled a hypothetical explicitly distanced from Anthropic out of his ass and kickstarted some citogenesis when people half-remembered that number and started quoting it as truth.
The only material claim of Anthropic is that they would "turn an operating profit of $559 million in the June quarter ... The company might not remain profitable for the full year as it plans spending increases due to its vast computing needs." with an explicit disclaimer that: "It is unclear what accounting methods Anthropic has used to book revenue and costs, as the company isn’t yet required to follow the financial-reporting requirements of a public company."
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-...
This is the exact same quarter where xAI is giving them deeply discounted compute, as such the numbers cannot be projected out to the later quarters once Anthropic has to actually pay xAI for the compute they use.
Finally, there's the reality that were the revenue numbers any good, Anthropic would just publish them and leapfrog OpenAI. That they do not provide clear GAAP numbers suggests the numbers are bad.
SpaceX gave em discount for the pre IPO quarter so they can show profit
Anthropic signed a deal to lease compute that is the bulk of SpaceX revenue
he's trying to steal OpenAI's limelight and shit on their road show
I'm actually quite surprised how much money Anthropic pulls
Also surprised that OpenAI is not pulling as much as I thought
All in all it looks like OpenAI is in a bit of a vulnerable position.
That has worked in the past for tech infrastructure, so there is clearly a gamble that it does that again here.