If you bought a script, that would be capitalized as an asset, and written off if abandoned. And so on.

The difference is that film and TV have an industry-specific standard (ASC 926). AI companies fall under the general R&D and software rules and those don't allow capitalization when there's significant uncertainty about whether or not the project will work. There's a new software standard (ASU 2025-06) that makes this explicit with a "significant development uncertainty" test. Because you don't know the outcome of a model training run until it's done the training costs are generally expensed as they are incurred.

Obviously there's room to debate whether the rules should be updated and maybe they will be in the future. But they are what they are now. Expensing model training as R&D isn't an accounting choice companies like Anthropic have made on their own. It's what the rules require. So obviously, understanding what the rules are and where different costs show up on the financial statement, it's clear that inference gross margin alone doesn't speak to whether the business is ultimately viable. But the high inference gross margins shouldn't be dismissed as meaningless or the product of some sort of accounting trickery either.