[joegibbs]

Anthropic at $1t for an IPO vs Google at $23b in 2004 sounds insane but Google's revenue at the time was $2.7b while Anthropic's already at $47b, so a valuation at about 20x vs 10x revenue. Anthropic also has very high revenue growth (50x since 2024), it doesn't seems quite as insane as it could be.

[SilverElfin]

What’s defensible about Anthropic’s revenue? It seems like OpenAI and others are equivalent. Open weight models are catching up. Google has ads networks, video platforms, and so much more.

I am skeptical that Anthropic and OpenAI can defend their dominance for long enough to make meaningful gaap accounted profits

[Spooky23]

Anthropic seems to have clawed its way to being the best AI and charging for itself. Microsoft had to slash the Anthropic budget… which it exceeded while being the exclusive host of OpenAI.

Google seems to have a good B2B and internal leveraging AI to make $. OpenAI/Microsoft seems to have squandered an early product lead.

And then you have the Muskiverse, where we have an rocket ship company that buys surplus cyber trucks, operates a space ISP, an AI company that produces virtual fetish porn and makes money renting GPUs to Anthropic, a rando dying social network and a tunnel company to cock-block public transit.

I may be underestimating the market for AI anime porn, but I think Anthropic is probably the best in class product right now. Google and AWS are probably the best positioned sellers of AI. SpaceXAI is the dark horse because they are likely enriching the dear leader more. OpenAI is fucked.

[AlexCoventry]

> an AI company that produces virtual fetish porn and makes money renting GPUs to Anthropic

Whatever Anthropic is paying is too much, since it means xAI will get to observe Anthropic's software, weights and operations in detail. It's probably contractually prohibited from doing so, but I doubt that would stop Musk, given what's at stake.

[0123456789ABCDE]

seems to be a well understood angle inside anthropic — colossus use expands subscriber capacity; training goes to aws/gcp

https://x.ai/news/anthropic-compute-partnership https://www.anthropic.com/news/higher-limits-spacex

[giancarlostoro]

Anthropic is profitable unlike OpenAI though. Sure they'll owe a lot of money for probably decades, but if they remain profitable moving forward, it will be worthwhile.

[SilverElfin]

That profit figure is a pre IPO marketing claim, not an audited and GAAP accounted number. And there is already a lot written about how Anthropic exaggerated revenue compared to OpenAI.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/josipamajic/2026/03/25/openai-a...

[jraby3]

This seems like it's because openAI actually partnered with Microsoft and has to give them 20% of their revenue. Anthropic isn't partnering with their cloud providers so it makes sense to me they count top line revenue and then give Amazon payment as an expense. Also the numbers seem pretty minor compared to anthropic $49B run rate. The article mentioned an openAI payment of around $500M.

[georgemcbay]

The question still remains whether they will be defensively profitable when things settle down.

I don't think open weight models are likely to overtake or match frontier models in the next year or so when it comes to doing the most difficult tasks, but I do expect a lot of people who are currently funneling wheelbarrows of money to Anthropic to realize that they can achieve the vast majority of things they are doing with LLMs just as well with much cheaper open weight models.

[giancarlostoro]

That is 100% valid, and I don't disagree.

[smithza]

Open weights are only valuable to people who have access to expensive hardware to run them on. Treating Anthropic as a service that lets you rent such hardware (there are multiple products that a single token operates on) is also where Anthropics investment and reinvestment applies.

[coliveira]

They will defend it the way any good monopoly always does: buying the competition. Case in point is Facebook: it is just a social network, the way they really stay on top is buying other companies and paying for people to spend even more time on their properties.

[jraby3]

They bought insta and WhatsApp but at the time neither were really social networks. Insta was a popular filtering app. WhatsApp is just recently turning into a social network with their status updates.

[coliveira]

That's a completely revisionist take. These apps were seen as the next wave of social networks that would compete with Facebook when it bought them.

[vb-8448]

I think their real moat is the grip they have in corporates.

Once they are in, they will catch most of the opportunities.

[testrun]

That is revenue. What is the net profit?

[jandrewrogers]

If you are growing revenue at a high rate then taking profit is a misallocation of resources. That is short-term thinking. It is much better to reinvest in revenue growth.

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.

[nixon_why69]

The point is that the unit economics are way worse because inference is expensive. Cost of goods sold matters, even if you're reinvesting profits.

[energy123]

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!)

[nixon_why69]

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.

[SlinkyOnStairs]

> 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.

[Ajedi32]

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?

[baobabKoodaa]

Anthropic is not MoviePass. Its unit economics will be fine after it decides to optimize for profitability.

[antasvara]

All of the analysis seems to rely on:

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.

[baobabKoodaa]

"Best in class" is a broad definition. Anthropic can easily charge a large premium for their "best in small class" and "best in medium class" models, for any given definition of "small" and "medium"

[jraby3]

Inference has dropped by like 75% from a year ago. While anthropic does offer more tokens now for the same money, the value of the business is based on an expectation of future profits. There are dozens, if not hundreds of examples of companies being valued this way.

[nixon_why69]

You could be right but the unit economics matter to this business in a way they don't for a SaaS or ads business, they're not free and you can't just point at revenue.

[MattDamonSpace]

Yeah but “intelligence” is very valuable and people are willing to pay

[richardwhiuk]

I have a high revenue business opportunity.

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.

[strulovich]

Now let’s see you do this with 40B. The f you can do that I will be intrigued, since it sounds like you solved a bunch of complicated economic problems.

[MagicMoonlight]

I could sell someone a hundred billion dollars for 40 billion dollars and have 40b in revenue. It would never make me any money.

[wrsh07]

Of course you can sell $1 for 90¢, but your unit economics look terrible. If you want to seriously critique Anthropic you need to explain why their unit economics are bad.

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

[smallerize]

I guess net isn't the relevant measure, but what are the unit economics? Are they actually making money selling tokens?

[crthpl]

on the API, their margins are very high

[tclancy]

That's not how classical valuations worked though. I was taught the rough shorthand for valuing a company was profits / real_interest_rate, treating the company like a perpetuity. Revenue ain't in it. Now we have a bunch of "We'll make it up on volume companies!" like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXDxNCzUspM

[crthpl]

no, it is discounted expected future cash flows

[themafia]

> That is short-term thinking.

Then why IPO? Isn't that even shorter term thinking?

[tedd4u]

Maybe they are struggling to put together money for datacenter buildout (Capex).

[wrsh07]

Net profit is the wrong metric for high growth companies. You want the unit economics.

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)

[383toast]

unit economics aren't great for anthropic are they

[wrsh07]

What do you think they are, what do you want them to be, and how much revenue and growth do they need before low margins make for a monster of a company?

[greiskul]

From all their desperation in making sure api keys are not used in contexts where they are not supposed to, I would say that they actually appear to have services where their profit is negative, if a customer is actually using their api to the limits they set, they lose money. They wouldn't have been this desperate in trying to shut off OpenClaw if it wasn't this way. Most companies that provide api infrastructure love when a killer app using their api is made by outsiders.

And while you can beat low margin with scale, there is the famous joke "we lose money on every sale, but make it up in volume".

If you scale a low margin operation, you can become giant. If you scale a loss making operation, you go bankrupt.

[wrsh07]

Yup - the subscriptions are a VC subsidy. They've been phasing their enterprise customers directly onto API-pay-per-usage pricing (hence the recent reports from Uber and Microsoft about phasing out Claude code). Rest assured, many of their customers are happy paying for the value they get from Claude code.

The subscription is the loss leader to show you how good it is. And people think it's good and worth paying for.

There is some reason to think their margins will improve, also: they couldn't really plan for the capacity they've needed so far this year, so they're paying through the nose for it. That's fine because they can pass the cost onto customers and give a more reliable service at cost. But in a few years, they should be able to get those costs under control (presuming some ops excellence. Something Google has in spades)

[elAhmo]

Please don't ask those rational questions, revenue is all that maters.

[giancarlostoro]

They reported 559 million in Q2 of this year. OpenAI on the other hand, is nowhere near this.

[qaq]

because of the mutual sweetheart deal with SpaceX

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

[zuzululu]

and i think here lies the chess move by Elon

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.

[qaq]

I don't know if it is a chess move but Elon certainly will take every possible opportunity to fk over Sam. Have to admit watching these two sociopaths duking it out is somewhat entertaining.

[elAhmo]

Not using GAAP, so this is just PR for them.

[daniel_iversen]

Doesn't inference have very good profit margins* but all the losses come from training?

* For now, when they don't have to compete much against companies like DeepSeek who supplies inference at 1/10th of the cost

[SlinkyOnStairs]

> Doesn't inference have very good profit margins* but all the losses come from training?

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.

[cmrdporcupine]

I suspect the answer is: in the future after Moore's law somehow inevitably does its thing.

That has worked in the past for tech infrastructure, so there is clearly a gamble that it does that again here.

[kaliqt]

While good to ask, that is less relevant so long as they can maintain runway.

[Schlagbohrer]

These AI companies will be able to jack prices way way up once companies and users are fully addicted to doing everything with their AI.

[conradkay]

Looks like it'll be more like $2t

https://polymarket.com/event/anthropic-ipo-closing-market-ca...

[smithza]

To assess where a event betting platform has placed their lines is in no way useful here. Perhaps you are only fishing for people to pile onto the other side of a bet you made or helping you to feel well about this bet you chose to make which would be an inappropriate use of this platform.