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.

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testrun 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That is revenue. What is the net profit?

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jandrewrogers 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	smallerize 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I guess net isn't the relevant measure, but what are the unit economics? Are they actually making money selling tokens?
	▲	themafia 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> That is short-term thinking. Then why IPO? Isn't that even shorter term thinking?

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giancarlostoro 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

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an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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SilverElfin 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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Spooky23 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> 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.

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giancarlostoro 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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...
	▲	georgemcbay 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.

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coliveira an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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conradkay 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Looks like it'll be more like $2t

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