That’s 52% gross margin. Not much higher than the overall S&P 500. If you break it down by sector, Real Estate, Health are, Financials (and of course Tech overall) have higher gross margins at the sector level.

That $1 of compute is not taking into account R&D spending, infrastructure, etc.

And that's their only revenue stream

>That $1 of compute is not taking into account R&D spending, infrastructure, etc

People assume this, but it is wrong. Check the S-1 for Q2, the $2.08 in revenue is for every $1.00 spent on "compute and infrastructure expenses" which also include R&D compute. (Chart is on page 137)

"Compute and infrastructure expenses primarily consist of costs attributable to operating our technology infrastructure, which supports the full range of workloads for our models, including research, model development, serving customers, and internal usage of Claude." page 146 in the S-1/A-1

It is not really clear. In the graph on page 137 does the "dollar of compute" includes only compute required for inference to provide the answer? Or does this include training as well?

It would be logical to assume that they show expense of compute required to maintain inference. Leaving training compute (which is huge expense) out.

I could only find these numbers in articles on something called crypto briefing dot com, not sure how the author got this number from the S-1.

When using traditional business metrics, such as operational net income, we'll see that Anthropic has been in the red for the entirety of its history, at times to the tune of $3B per quarter, except in Q2 2026.

When looking at amended S-1 (with Q3 numbers), page 23, "Consolidated Statements of Operational Data", we can see that for 2026 YTD (Q1 - Q3) net loss was $103B; operating loss was $1,260B.

Anthropic also disclosed up to $895B (multiyear) commitments for infrastructure build-up.

Basically, the company's financial results do not allow for any reasonable valuation (which would be more than 0), leave alone $2T or even $1T. If this is not an indication of a bubble I don't know what is.

If your hyper growth startup is not in the red for its entire history, it fucked up. One can argue their "profitable" Q2 was a mistake, startups at this stage should be far from profitable

While this is true, most of Anthropic's expenses involve locking up compute for the future. But they have no idea how much compute they will actually need in the future, or how much they're going to be able to charge their customers for it. Per token prices are dropping like a rock, and performance optimizations are making model serving more efficient. Combine that with the comparatively slower growth in organic AI demand (compared to debt-driven/investor subsidized demand), and you have the very real possibility of a 2000-style "dark fiber" problem.

There's no dynamic in their financial results which points to profitability with any probability at any point in the future. Yes, the revenue grows. The expenses grow even faster, AND they plan to move to building their own infrastructure instead of renting in the future (more risk as they need to be able to execute that).

One question is: can they maintain those margins? Anthropic currently is the most expensive provider by far, and it is not clear that Opus delivers enough value to justify the markup over their competitors. E.g. OpenAI charges half of Anthropic's API rates for Sol vs. Opus or Terra vs. Sonnet and appears to be more token-efficient, not to mention all the other providers.

While inference may become more efficient and drive costs down for Anthropic in the long term (though over the next decade, they have hundreds of billions in data center commitments, so it's not going to to happen soon), that goes for every provider. Commoditiziation and competition on price is likely to happen, and with models getting ever better, the value proposition of frontier models would become much less compelling.