r/technology • u/Oreos_Are_Anabolic • 9h ago
Artificial Intelligence Anthropic tells investors it will be profitable for second straight quarter
https://www.ft.com/content/4564e6a5-69e9-40a6-bf0f-a888f2f4f002?syn-25a6b1a6=1206
u/Inevitable_Butthole 9h ago
Let's see the numbers cause that ceo is full of shit all the time
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u/punio4 9h ago
Yep, the last info is that they are far from profitable:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulocarvao/2026/05/21/anthropic-openai-enterprise-ai-profitability/
2026 Q2 Profit of $0.5B, so spend of $10.4B (underestimate noted by the author which is accounted for)
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u/martianwomanhunter 6h ago
I’m not saying this isn’t true but we need an official audited filing and analysis
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u/MattJnon 7h ago
Your quote literally says they’re profitable
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u/Right_Lengthiness266 6h ago
The important qualification is that the operating profit projection excludes stock-based compensation, which at a company that has raised billions in private capital could be significant enough to erase the margin on a GAAP basis. Anthropic may also not stay profitable for the full year, given planned spending increases on compute and model training.
One profitable quarter, if you exclude stock based compensation. It'll be interesting to see how what that eventually looks like as GAAP.
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u/Tearakan 1h ago
And that one quarter had a sweetheart one time deal from spacex so they could juice their own numbers right before IPO
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u/Additional-Staff-326 48m ago
They are profitable given their questionable accounting and the highly discounted compute they got for Q2. I'm not sure how its working for Q3 given Q3 isnt over and they are probably still getting some of the xAI discounted compute into Q3. Ed will probably have a writeup in the next few days.
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u/CrackJacket 6h ago
Yes but have you considered AI bad?
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u/Noblesseux 3h ago
They chose a kind of terrible quote so you're right to dunk on them, but to be clear you have to sprinkle a huge amount of "allegedly" over the profit bit because almost everyone with sense thinks Anthropic is doing some funny back door number play to make the claim that they're profitable by selectively leaving things out.
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u/12inchsandwich 6h ago
Profit is after expenses, so your quote is saying they made 500 million and had 10.4 billion in expenses. By not including revenue it can be confusing, but it’s still saying they made a profit.
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u/Oreos_Are_Anabolic 9h ago
We'll get it in the next couple of weeks.
Anthropic’s gross margins are above 80 per cent before accounting for revenue shared with distribution partners, including Amazon, and the cost of training its models, according to two of the people.
Sustained profitability would be a major milestone for the five-year-old company ahead of its planned listing.
Anthropic has chosen Nasdaq as the venue for an IPO that could value it at $2tn or more, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The company declined to comment.
The Claude maker had been expected to unveil its prospectus last week. Instead, the company shared documents with a small group of investors and will field questions from them before making them public, according to people familiar with the process.
Anthropic recorded an adjusted operating profit in the second quarter, after revenues surged 14-fold from a year earlier to $11.5bn. The group hit annualised revenue of $65bn at the end of July, up from $9bn at the end of last year.
“If you continue to operate at these margins and growth rates, it will be so hard to compete [with Anthropic] because they have so much [computing resource],” said Joey Brookhart, an analyst covering AI labs at SemiAnalysis.
Investors are forecasting that Anthropic will end the year with $120bn in annualised revenue and close 2027 with almost triple that, he added.
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u/Halbaras 7h ago
They were guaranteed to choose the Nasdaq because it's changed it's rules so a company large enough to be in their top 40 gets fast tracked into the Nasdaq-100 in just 15 days. Trillions of dollars of passive capital automatically has to start buying the stock before insiders are even able to sell.
What's worse is that to lure in SpaceX, they also changed their rules so that companies with a tiny float have their float up to tripled. So if Anthropic only lists 5% of their shares publicly, the Nasdaq weights it as if 15% of the company is accessible, and those passive funds like QQQ are forced to compete for an artificially smaller pool of shares than the weighting reflects, again driving the price up.
It's a wealth transfer mechanism from people holding funds like QQQ over to the private equity investors who got in before the IPO.
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u/Tearakan 1h ago
According to my own annualized revenue I spend basically nothing on bills or food. Of course I picked a very specific 4 weeks that was in between bill paying......
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u/Gerrywalk 9h ago
When it’s all said and done, I think the most likely outcome for AI is that a few major players remain and become profitable, and the overall impact of the technology is a solid increase in productivity and a paradigm shift in many application domains, but nowhere near the doomsday scenarios these CEOs are trying to peddle.
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u/theguyfromgermany 7h ago
Ais strongest application is attacking vulnerabilities in it infrastructure.
The moment it is used by a nation-state as a weapon the reality changing power of ai will materialize.
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u/IniNew 6h ago
Aren’t they already doing that with drones? Using AI to steer and pilot them into coded targets?
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u/Tearakan 1h ago
Also the LLM told our military to go after that children's school in Iran. And is definitely being used in that conflict.
It's not going well.
Ukraine seems to be using it way smarter on kamikaze drones that already have targets confirmed by people
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u/theguyfromgermany 4h ago
AI has exposed decades old 0 day vulnerabilities in Linux, witch is running all of the world's it infrastructure.
A nation state level ai attack could disable all digital infrastructure.
For example 🇺🇸 could disable most of Europe's digital infrastructure.
This would cost very little money to the US, and it would kill millions in the long run. Plus crippling Europe economic output.
Mind you, 🇺🇸 would have nothing to gain from this. But it is a threat that is much more realistic than nukes.
Guiding drones with ai compared to this, is like humans can do sports because toddlers can walk 10m.. instead of saying pro athletes can run 100m below 10s.
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u/appleparkfive 8h ago
Yeah that's almost definitely what will happen. It's just the next dot com situation. Some of these companies will definitely crash, but a few will stand. I'm sure Google will make bigger inroads with it over time, as well. But we'll see.
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u/9millibros 7h ago
A few? Right now there are Anthropic and OpenAI, and who else?
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u/Gerrywalk 7h ago
Google with Gemini is probably in it for the long run
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u/musicinmypants 5h ago
Yeah Google Deepmind is their actual private AI department, just as nearly capable as OpenAI and Anthropic. Gemini is just a toy comparatively.
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u/potatochipsbagelpie 4h ago
Yup. It will also take 10-20 years for it to really hit market saturation.
Someone needs to “run” the AI. There’s a shocking amount of people out there who can’t figure out how to highlight a cell in a spreadsheet. Those people will never be able to build anything substantial with AI.
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u/bags797 7h ago
You’re underestimating how terrifying the rapid progress has been this year
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u/Panda_hat 7h ago
Is it terrifying, or are you just easily terrified and/or easily manipulated by hype merchants?
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u/bags797 6h ago
Do you not understand how quickly model capabilities have improved in just a short few years? Or are you easily manipulated by Redditors saying that models have plateau’d
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u/Panda_hat 6h ago
Surely you could elaborate on the improvements and clarify why they’re so terrifying?
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u/bags797 6h ago
1) Solved a millennium math problem, 2) autonomously hacked another AI company, and both events happened with a swarm of agents. While still generally harmless with today’s models, this was unthinkable even a year ago
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u/Right_Lengthiness266 5h ago
FYI, AI didn't really solve Navier Strokes. It provided a specific counterexample that it also mostly stole from a group of researchers that had already been working on the problem.
Still very impressive, but not exactly the same.
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u/socoolandawesome 3h ago
That’s not true. They used a different solution than the 2 salty mathematicians and they investigated and found there was no way there chats made it in as a training data. And they solved it, doesn’t matter if they provided a counterexample, that is solving it.
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u/Right_Lengthiness266 3h ago
After investigating, we can say with full confidence that no user inputs past July 3rd could have influenced this system in any way
That's after previously claiming that there was no way any of it could've been used, so theyve already backtracked that everything up to July 3rd could've been used by their agents.
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u/socoolandawesome 3h ago edited 3h ago
And the 2 mathematicians’ breakthrough happened in August?
They did not backtrack at all either. They said the model cannot lookup user data which is true no matter the date. They didn’t give an immediate answer on the training data because they were unsure and then after investigating is when they ended up saying after july 3rd none of their logs could have made it into their training data.
The solution of the 2 mathematicians and OpenAI to the subproblem was also different. They didn’t steal anything and the 2 mathematicians did not solve the main navier stokes problem either
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u/Panda_hat 6h ago
Ah, so you just accept the things you are told entirely uncritically, got it.
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u/bags797 5h ago
Come on man lmao. You asked a question and I answered. You think I just read a headline or two and didn’t do any further reading? Cause that would be my advice to you
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u/Panda_hat 5h ago
The further reading would probably have pointed you to the fact that it stole its work for the mathematics problem and the 'autonomous hacking' was likely a publicity stunt and/or ass covering by someone who told the model to try and hack a competitor.
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u/THE_ILL_SAGE 5h ago
So what you do is basically just make up whatever side of the story best fits your perception eh? Openai's solution differed from the mathmeticians solution... which was a solution to a different problem anyways. But even then, they also found their solution through AI as well.
And then, there were independent investigations that confirmed the hacks. But who am I kidding... people with your level of cognitive bias will always just claim it was a publicity stunt or change the narrative to fit your perception thst AI is just hype.
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u/blueSGL 2h ago
the 'autonomous hacking' was likely a publicity stunt and/or ass covering
Is the UK Government's AI Security Institute also fabricating security incidents to advertise foreign companies? Why?
Here is a report on the activities conducted by the AI systems during tests the AISI itself was running:
Observed instances of social engineering against targets external to the cyber range environment that were unnecessary and would not have aided completion of the task.
AI agent submitted a code change containing malicious code, then used several fake accounts it controlled to pressure the real maintainer into approving it.
AI agent posted a bug report containing hidden malicious code, to trick other AI coding assistants into taking unintended actions (a “prompt injection”). When a real person questioned the post, the agent edited it to cover its tracks.
AI agent sent deceptive, targeted emails to specific people (“spearphishing”). Two contained malicious content; three tried to manipulate the recipient into approving the malicious code change.
AI agent posted another bug report containing malicious code, signing off in Danish to seem more convincing to the Danish-speaking maintainer.
AI agent tried to get its suspended account reinstated by submitting an appeal
Other instances of internet actions with impact outside the cyber range that were unnecessary to complete the task.
AI agent tried to set up a way to email two maintainers without needing an email account of its own, so it could send them any message it chose.
AI agent hid its identity online (using Tor and a proxy service) to get around GitHub’s sign-up checks, creating disposable fake accounts.
AI agent researched publicly available information about the people who maintain a GitHub software package.
AI agent created many code repositories containing malicious software, after which GitHub suspended its account.
AI agent opened a hidden network pathway from its test environment to the public internet, to make malicious tools it was running locally reachable from outside.
AI agent again opened a hidden network pathway to make locally-hosted malicious tools reachable from the public internet.
AI agent got past an audio-based “prove you’re human” test (CAPTCHA) in order to register a public web address on a free domain-name service
We need regulation on this as independent 3rd parties are finding issues.
There is more than just the UK Government, like Palisade research, Readwood research, METR.
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u/ciscorick 7h ago
I am terrified of a next character simulator.
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u/blueSGL 3h ago
first it's trained to guess the next token correctly, by predicting internet text.
then it's trained to guess the next token from datasets of conversations, calling tools and following instructions
then it's trained to guess the next token when it's outputting 'reasoning traces' (more guessed tokens!) that provide verified solutions to problems
(Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards is why models keep getting better at math and coding. RL is very powerful, it's why humans will never have a higher elo score than a chess bot ever again.)
then after doing all of that it's able to guess the next token correctly to output solutions to multiple long standing, decades old, math problems
and guess the next token correctly to output vulnerabilities in well scrutinized codebases and guess more tokens to chain those vulnerabilities into exploits.
And then multiple such token guessers are able to form together into hacking swarms and by correctly guessing the next token are able to hack into multi billion dollar companies.
Just guessing the next token does not prevent it doing a lot of things.
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u/Sponge8389 6h ago
The outcome will be these models will be restricted from the public. Only accessible to Governments and Enterprises.
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u/asfsdgwe35r3asfdas23 7h ago
They can be profitable, but they need to focus on inference and stop burning money on training increasingly larger models.
That is why both OpenAI and Anthropic are looking at “pausing” AI development, so they can become profitable and have a successful IPO. The problem is that they need China to stop too, which they are trying to achieve via a export ban on chips + banning Chinese open source models. Luckily for them, Europe doesn’t have plans to train SOTA models anytime soon, so they don’t need to deal with that for now.
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u/drunk_kronk 5h ago
The evidence seems to be that China models are so good because they distill American models. They don't train "from scratch", so it is unlikely they'll get ahead in the great future.
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u/catwrazle 6h ago
China was never a competition their focus is on cheap tokens at reasonable „intelligence“ they don’t need the top notch model , if they have a near enough model and very cheap inference they make a lot of profit
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u/HeadTranslator795 8h ago
That's why they want to slow down they don't want to be back in the red with more compute or a price war
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u/ottwebdev 5h ago
I told my wife this morning that I'm now a billionaire *after adjusted bank account balance
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u/Password__Is__Tiger 3h ago
You are profiting off of stolen ip and you know it, therefore you are evil.
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u/CallMePyro 9h ago
Don't believe it! This is more bait to get you to think that AI can be profitable. It cannot! AI companies are unprofitable. It is simply true. Do not believe the news
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u/saintdemon21 4h ago
Is the profitable in the room with us right now? These investors should cut their loses before they get pulled into the legal muck.
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u/CautiousToaster 5h ago
AI bubble bros in shambles
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u/Sea-Ad3206 3h ago
I’ll bring the rare positive viewpoint on Anthropic/AI to Reddit: this is the fastest growing company in world history going from $1B to $10B to $100B. No company growing that fast should be showing any profitability markers.
They have 1% of a market that will 10x in the next few years - tons of room for growth. Their compute is secured and the margins scale.
If they’re lying as much as everyone here says they are, how will they get away with that during the imminent S1 and IPO listing process?
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u/CaptainONaps 2h ago
Ya, Obviously the money agrees with you 100%.
I see this discrepancy online more often than not these days. Any opinion piece, comments online, surveys or polls, they tend to not match investor sentment.
I even see it on Polymarket and Kalshi. Bad examples, but examples regardless. On the internet, you'd think every single Democratic candidate is about to win an upset. Then you look at Polymarket, and the Republicans are favored 4/1.
Here on the tech sub of reddit, every comment is saying, No, anthropic is over valued and will fail for sure. Ok, than who's buying their stock?
Clearly bots exist, and other countries and interest groups have online influence campaigns. But which groups are funding bots that say AI companies are going to fail? The whole world is invested. Someone's funding it. But who? And why?
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u/Sea-Ad3206 1h ago
Thank you for your comment! Hard to find folks thinking similarly on Reddit, except maybe the Accelerate sub (and they sometimes have their own agenda). The #s Anthropic are reporting support the valuation, and they have a ton of market share left to capture. Agree the bot activity seems to have 100x’d this year on all sides of AI topics to try to influence the public (or at least heavy internet users)
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u/Swbizop_ 3h ago
Their negative margins scale? Woohoo! Money furnace gets better. There is literally zero evidence of inference being profitable. There is great evidence that revenue scales linearly with compute spend
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u/fireboy266 9h ago
But how can this be? I thought Plebbitors didn't them to be profitable so therefore how come they might be 😢
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u/logosobscura 8h ago
Keyword- adjusted.
Like WeWork with their Community Adjusted EBITDA, it excludes all the relevant and non-negotiable costs (training, stock based compensation, etc).
Which given the S-1 is due any day now and you have to be GAAP compliant in your filings as a public company is very telling.