That's not really how people discuss subsidies and finances though. Yea I guess a not-profitable company means that every operation is technically a "subsidy", but again, that's not really what those words mean.

Anthropic (as the ever-chosen example) has explicitly stated they've made more money than they've spent on training when they sell/serve a particular model in the past. They said that the reason they're negative is the next model costs more than the "profit" they've made on the previous one. This wasn't strict financial disclosures, but I'd presume this means that their data center costs (eg. power, hardware, etc) are baked into that, but probably not company-wide costs like marketing.

They do have several sources of revenue, all tied to their models: APIs, Subscriptions, and model licensing. Their licensing and APIs most likely have a positive margin -> the money they make to serve the n+1 customer is more than the cost to serve that customer, on a per-financial-transaction basis. It's speculated that they lose money per-customer to serve the subscriptions, and they eat that cost... for various potential reasons.

It is when you discuss financial health of a company, at least that’s what I picked up after doing fintech and loans, it’s the bottom line that matters, or the projected outcome of the same. What point is there making money in area A when area B costs more. If you can stop doing B without affecting A that’s usually what happens, but it’s not always possible.

Saying ”we’re positive except the foundation of the company (training models) isn’t” is a tell tale sign.

And I’m sure Anthropic is doing what most others are doing, heavily massaging numbers to make them look good for VC rounds.