Anthropic is currently profitable, generating around $1B/quarter and ~$50B in ARR. About 75% to 85% of Anthropic's revenue comes from its usage-based API business, which has a gross margin that exceeds 80%. https://www.tradingkey.com/analysis/stocks/us-stocks/2620181...
Meanwhile, OpenAI is at ~$25B ARR, but is likely not yet profitable.
>The divergence in business models is directly reflected in financial data. SemiAnalysis estimates that Anthropic's overall gross margin has rebounded from negative 94% in 2024 to the mid-60% range, with the gross margin of its API business exceeding 80%.
Their link seems to claim semi analysis thinks it is 80%. It looks like it might be referencing this newer article from them, as the same picture is in both articles, but I didn't feel like paying to find out: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/anthropic-3q26-profit-...
Looks like it’s behind a paywall. I’ll take their word for it that semi analysis now estimate it to be 80%. That makes my point even stronger, if that number is true, where is the money? The report says that Anthropic generate over $50bn in revenue so at 80% margins that gives $40bn in profit. Where is that money? If they’re generating $40bn in profit, even after accounting for very high employee compensation and training costs… they should have tens of billions in profit, yet they’re out raising tens of billions instead. Where is the money going? And if only 20% is their actual inference costs, where are all these compute providers going to make their money? The world is at compute capacity on, what, $10bn in revenue?
If you figured out how to build a machine that turns electricity into gold with an 80% margin, of course you’d go out raising capital to build more machines.
no, even if we assume their margins are 90% (they are not) they are still losing money because the $200 plans allow for tens of thousands of dollars worth of inference and a huge number of users are milking every cent across multiple accounts. Every “reset” OpenAI and Anthropic do is setting money on fire.
If it were true that they’re making money hand over fist they wouldn’t need to raise tens of billions of dollars every few months.
In Amodei’s Dwarkesh podcast he says that they are constantly estimating the increase in demand for the next leg up, then going out to raise money to build for it. So it’s not necessarily that they are raising money because they are unprofitable.
Anthropic aren't building out the data centres themselves, they're renting/leasing/borrowing from companies that are doing the actual spend on building out infrastructure. And the data centre companies aren't spending their own money, they're borrowing too (hence Apollo investing in data centres). Anthropic are paying SpaceX ~$1.25bn/month right now for access to more compute, that's $15bn a year, more than what these supposed margins would require in total spend (based on current revenue estimates).
The SpaceX deal is a great example of Anthropic creating demand, i.e:
> We’ve agreed to a partnership with SpaceX that will substantially increase our compute capacity. This, along with our other recent compute deals, means that we’ve been able to increase our usage limits for Claude Code and the Claude API.
They committed to spending $15bn per year with SpaceX and then increased limits for customers on fixed cost plans, creating more demand without any increase in revenue.
So, sure, it's not necessarily that they are raising money because they are unprofitable, but no alternate explanation makes any sense. The argument that could maybe made in favor is based on announcements like this one:
> Today, we are announcing a $50 billion investment in American computing infrastructure, building data centers with Fluidstack in Texas and New York, with more sites to come. These facilities are custom built for Anthropic with a focus on maximizing efficiency for our workloads, enabling continued research and development at the frontier.
You might conclude from that, Anthropic are financing Fluidstack's build out, but they're not.
Just after that announcement, Fluidstack raised $830 million to build out data centres, none of the money coming from Anthropic. Fluidstack are currently rumored to be raising another $1bn. Anthropic's "$50 billion investment in American computing infrastructure" is just committed spend on renting compute from Fluidstack, a commitment that Fluidstack then use to raise money to actually deliver it. If Anthropic making money hand over fist, they wouldn't need to raise for committed spend.
And thus we return to the original question, how does future demand translate to spend? Actual handing over of dollars?
> even if we assume their margins are 90% (they are not)
How do you know they are not?
It will be curious to see the cost of inference for these newly released open weight models and will help give an idea of the actual cost of inference. But for now, I think saying the $200 plans allows for "tens of thousands of dollars worth of inference" provides very little insight when you are measuring the inference cost in API pricing with an unknown margin.
The simple question to ask is, if it is so profitable, where is all the money going? If Anthropic have 90% margins on API usage and API usage is $50bn+ in revenue per year, where is the $45bn going? Why do they need to raise so much cash, constantly?