🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Anthropic’s revenue depends on an accounting choice

• Anthropic’s fast revenue growth comes partly from counting sales through cloud partners as revenue 1.
• OpenAI handles those sales differently and does not include them, so top-line comparisons between the two AI companies are hard for investors to read 1.
• Reported revenue growth alone does not reveal how much cash the business keeps after the steep cost of running AI systems 2.
• Anthropic cut its 2025 gross profit margin forecast to 40% because inference costs rose, meaning the expense of generating answers from AI models, which helps explain the need for such a large capital injection 3.

This funding round raises the stakes in AI

• The implied valuation comes to about 20 times annualized revenue, far above the multiples public software companies usually get 4.
• Investors are accepting years of cash burn while betting Anthropic can secure a lasting lead in the market 4.
• Raises on this scale from Anthropic and OpenAI leave little room for new AI model developers to compete at the frontier of AI.
• Building and training leading AI models now takes tens of billions of dollars, leaving only a small group of heavily funded AI companies able to take part 4.