"As of October [2025], OpenAI's compute margins reached 70%, up from 52% at the end of 2024 and double the rate in January 2024, [The Information] said, citing a person familiar with the figures."
As for Anthropic, the rumors I remember seeing for their API margins were more like 85-90%, but I don't have a reference at hand for those. But once you know the API is wildly profitable and the subscriptions are roughly break-even and not even a big slice of their income, all of the investment makes a lot more sense.
It says the original report was in the Information, which I can't see, but I'm skeptical that they includes the training cost? And how much that changes the figure?
That's the profit margin on inference, not overall. Each model does end up being profitable over its lifetime, but the money they're making is being immediately churned into buying more data centers & the training for the next giant model up, so they're not profitable overall at the moment. It's a bit like how Amazon kept churning their profits into more growth instead of taking the profit early.
That said, Anthropic has supposedly crossed over into profitability and made $1 Billion in profit so far this year, in the lead up to their IPO. Being profitable sounds good for launching on the stock market! But as a customer, that's noticeable in the downtime due to lack of compute, and only getting 50% access to Fable.
OpenAI might not be profitable, but they've got so much compute access that they've been able to give their customers full access to Sol, and as a result they've almost doubled their Codex subscriber base in the last two weeks (6 million on July 12, 10 million on July 21 - that would be an extra $1-$10 Billion in Annual Recurring Revenue that they've gained in just these 2 weeks). Doing the unprofitable thing in the short term can result in outsized rewards in the long term.
On the other hand, the consumer side of the market seems to be less competitive right now.
OpenAI's new Mac app doesn't even have a normal "Chat" option now. OpenAI might be chasing coding and b2b sales more now that they realise very few regular consumers pay for subscriptions.