You're missing a very big part of the argument.

As I understand it: in a sworn affidavit (in federal court no less) the norm is to state the tightest accurate floor. A CFO sitting on $6.7B in recognized revenue writes "exceeding $6 billion" or "approaching $7 billion," not "exceeding $5 billion." That's the basis for the 25–35% overstatement claim. This is about legal/financial language norms. It's not OK to under-represent just the same as it would not be OK to over-represent. But let's pretend this is an unusual circumstance (it's not) and that the understatement was a one time thing (it wasn't either based on past statements). So...

Then you have the speedometer/odometer math. Just December 2025 through early March 2026, at Anthropic's own ARR-implied monthly rates, sums to roughly $4.25B ($750M + $750M + $1.17B + $1.58B). If lifetime revenue is barely "exceeding $5B," that leaves under ~$750M for everything before December 2025. But... Anthropic was already reporting $1B ARR in January 2025. This is the argument and "6.7 > 5" doesn't address it because now we're seeing the CFO play the other side of the coin.

So no matter which way you look at it Anthropic's CFO has lied publicly and in very large numbers. You don't get to spin numbers, especially sworn numbers, in a way that benefits you. The only way that can even remotely work is that you're consistent. This is sloppy and all over the board which implies Anthropic wants to hide something.

> You don't get to spin numbers, especially sworn numbers, in a way that benefits you

If it's "a filing where Anthropic was trying to impress a federal court with its commercial scale", then wouldn't the understatement ("exceeds $5B" rather than "exceeds $6B") be to their detriment?

My assumption would be that the February numbers were not yet determined when Krishna Rao was initially writing the affidavit (say, one week before its submission date, if legal review/revisions take some time), which would make "exceeds $5B" the strongest claim that could be safely made.

> As I understand it: in a sworn affidavit (in federal court no less) the norm is to state the tightest accurate floor.

All three of the numbers in the affidavit are nice round multiples of five billion dollars, so the simpler assumption might be they just rounded looser than you think? He also told the court they'd raised over $60 billion, when the precise number was actually $69.1B (as of Feb 12), so they would appear to have taken the 1 significant figure floor for the numbers in the court filing.