Image: Anthropic Anthropic Tells Investors It's Profitable Again — Read the Asterisk
The FT reports Anthropic told shareholders adjusted operating income will be positive for a second straight quarter, with gross margins above 80% — measured before training costs and partner payouts. Those exclusions do a lot of work.
Anthropic has told shareholders it expects to post a profit for the second quarter in a row, the Financial Times reported Sunday, citing multiple people familiar with the matter. It's the kind of line that reads like a milestone for an AI lab burning cash to train frontier models — until you read the measure.
The profit is on adjusted operating income, which excludes stock-based compensation — standard practice for tech companies, but not the whole picture. The gross margins the FT cites, above 80%, are measured before revenue shared with distribution partners including Amazon and before the cost of training the models themselves. Reuters, which carried the FT's report on September 13, noted it could not independently verify the figures, and Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.
The caveats are doing real work here, as MarketWatch and Morningstar both pointed out Monday. Training a frontier model is enormously expensive — MarketWatch cited SpaceX's AI segment, which reported $2.03 billion in R&D costs against $1.47 billion in revenue last quarter, mostly tied to training Grok and building AI products. Anthropic's partner revenue splits matter too: The Information reported earlier this year that Anthropic's share to partners including Amazon ran around 10% of sales, though that was when revenue was smaller.
What's not in dispute is the revenue trajectory. Per Mint's reporting, Anthropic's revenue surged 14-fold year over year to $11.5 billion in the second quarter, and annualized revenue hit $65 billion at the end of July, up from $9 billion at the end of last year. The company is preparing for a public listing — Mint describes it as a potential $2 trillion IPO — and two straight quarters of adjusted profit is exactly the story you tell ahead of one.
The timing is awkward in one respect: CEO Dario Amodei spent the weekend calling for the industry to slow down the pace of new model releases, a statement that, alongside similar comments from OpenAI's Sam Altman and SpaceX's Elon Musk, helped send chip and memory stocks tumbling in Monday's premarket, per Barron's. Profitable on an adjusted basis while arguing the industry should hit the brakes — it's a combination only this market could produce.
Sources: Reuters, MarketWatch, Mint, Barron's.