As Ed Zitron pointed out, that "quarter" of profitability is EBITDA profitability and comes with plenty of creative accounting. When they do it for a year, we can say "They have found profitability"

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WarmWash 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

This[1][2] Ed Zitron, or another one?

Because I don't know how you can be so totally and completely wrong for so many years, and still have people lend you credibility. But I definitely do understand how you can rage farm subscription dollars from suckers for years.

[1]https://www.wheresyoured.at/bubble-trouble/

[2]https://www.wheresyoured.at/to-serve-altman/

	▲	tacktal 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yea what do guys like Damodaran know about finance and valuation. This board is only good to understand the consensus dipshit opinion.

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tristanj 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Why are you citing old news? Zitron wrote that months ago when Anthropic was reported to have ~30B ARR. Anthropic now has more than double that, at even higher margins.

There's no doubt at this point that Anthropic is profitable.

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stackskipton 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Because again, we haven't seen further reports. As always, we are debating financials on a company that doesn't have to disclose them regularly.

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tristanj 2 days ago | parent [-]

We most certainly have: https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/anthropics-gross-margin-i...

The companies are growing so rapidly that citing their financials from several months ago is practically worthless.

	▲	disgruntledphd2 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> We most certainly have: https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/anthropics-gross-margin-i... This is all un-audited speculation. Even audited financials often have massive weirdness, but unaudited revenue/margin numbers are basically garbage. > The companies are growing so rapidly that citing their financials from several months ago is practically worthless. I wish I lived in a world where this was true. Unless their inference margins are fat enough to pay for training and employees (including SBC) then their historical financials are really important. Again, I could be wrong here but without the S-1 nobody really knows (unless they work for Anthropic, in which case they should really not be commenting in this thread).

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InsideOutSanta 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If they were profitable, they'd release real numbers and announce concrete plans for an IPO. They are very obviously not profitable; they just announced a $65B Series H two months ago.

They're almost literally setting money on fire.

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tristanj 3 days ago | parent [-]

Utterly false -- review the numbers yourself

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind-blowing-growth-is-about-to-...

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/anthropic-3q26-profit-...

The company was profitable in Q2 and is projected to exceed $1B in profit in Q3.

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stackskipton 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I can't read the first article 100% but it's linked here: https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle... which I noted in my original post seems to be full of juiced numbers.

Second link talks about revenue and operating costs. Again, it's very possible that Anthropic is profitable as I hinted looking at pure revenue vs operating costs. That's like saying your delivery service is profitable because you are only looking at the cost of drivers + gas and ignoring maintenance, car purchases and building of garages to get you to that point.

Again, the poster you replied to is right. If they are extremely profitable, the logical thing is file S-1 publicly and IPO. The fact they haven't done so is interesting.

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tristanj 2 days ago | parent [-]

1) Ed Zitron has one of the worst track records in the AI space. He's consistently wrong about everything. Every major prediction he has made over the past five years has aged terribly.

2) After calling the doom of OpenAI and Anthropic for half a decade, Zitron pivoted this year into accusing these companies of financial engineering and fraud. I have read the "article" you linked and he makes this accusation with no evidence backing it up.

3) I intentionally did not address your "delivery service" example because it is financially illiterate. Per the first section of the links provided (which you can read without paywall), Anthropic is EBITDA profitable. EBITDA profitability implies the company has positive gross margins AND is operational profitable, which means the company is profitable under your fictitious "delivery service" scenario.

4) Claiming a profitable company must immediately file an S-1 and IPO is a non-sequitur. Thousands of large, highly profitable companies choose to stay private for strategic reasons.

5) Did you casually forget the fact that Anthropic is currently in the process of going public? They already filed a draft S-1 with the SEC. They're planning an IPO this October. Having gone through an IPO myself, it takes over a year of preparation for an IPO. The slow timeline is completely normal for a company of their size.

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InsideOutSanta 2 days ago | parent [-]

Anthropic has not released an official EBITDA figure.

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saberience 2 days ago | parent [-]

It’s a not very well kept secret in the industry that Anthropic has been profitable for some time now and there are margins are only getting better.

We knew they were maybe at 30-40% margin a few months ago but now it’s looking like they are operating at more like 70-80% margin.

The new Nvidia chips and the improved inference stack is only making this situation better for them.

	▲	InsideOutSanta 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> It’s a not very well kept secret in the industry I would rather say it's been a very well kept secret if it's true, which I highly doubt. It also makes absolutely no sense; so far, Anthropic has taken every opportunity they had to release good numbers. Why would they keep it secret if they were wildly profitable? None of this makes any sense. The only thing that makes sense is that Anthropic isn't profitable at all, and is burning investor money to stay afloat. Else, why keep raising tens of billions and only release vague annualized numbers? Genuinely, this makes no sense at all. If you want to convince people otherwise, you need more than just "oh, it's a secret, but we all know it."

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InsideOutSanta 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Not a single thing in my comment is false.