Anthropic’s “Profitability” Swindle by Ed Zitron

That’s $15 billion a year in compute costs, but reduced to an indeterminately-discounted level for the precise months that Anthropic is using to tell investors and the media that it has an operating profit. That operating profit is a result of accountancy rather than any improvements to its business model.

It just does not feel right reading this. The unit economics would never let them turn profitable. Or so it seems. The costs will increase linearly with revenue.

Whenever I read about these companies I always think back to a novel I had read in the Foundation series, where they talk about a technology which was awesome but the costs never made sense. So there’s one working artifact in the entire place and that’s it.

This feels similar. Maybe this side of the business will always run at cost or at loss and they are all looking for people to pay them more of other ways for people to pay them money.