Say I open a premium lemonade stand. I buy Walmart lemonade for $1 and resell it for $2. I have around 10 customers a day, but 2 of them buy 1,000 litres of lemonade each. The rest just buy a single cup. I'm making amazing profit.

There's just one detail: those 2 high-volume customers are buying my lemonade and re-selling them at a loss for $1 at another neighbourhood. Supposedly some high-profile Japanese bank is financing their lemonade purchasing expenses for eye-wateringly high interest rates. I've heard its well into the double digits. But that's not important, because the future is right around the corner - I can feel it - and in the future everyone wants lemonade. Thousands of litres of it. So even if those two customers go away, things will be fine!

It will all work out in the end. This is a totally sustainable business model. In fact I'm even thinking of going public.

I'm not really in that camp, but I'm still in the camp of "will they survive long-term if good enough open models trickles down to commodity hardware" (in a way the opposite camp perhaps?).

Sun made bank 25 years ago because their servers was needed for websites, today we run larger workloads on 5$ VPS servers (well maybe the VPS servers has gotten more expensive due to HW shortages but they're not intrinsically expensive anymore).

First of all, revenue exceeds compute just for the most recent 2 quarters. Before that, revenue was not exceeding compute. With 500 billion $ in commitments over the next decade, the compute bill will start increasing rapidly and the new commitments are not at the old prices, they're at higher prices.

Second of all, revenue is not profit. So even if they made 2.08x revenue on every 1$ of compute spent in Q2, that's not taking into consideration all the other costs. Hence, the operating income is still negative for 2026 so far.

You can bet that revenue will keep increasing much faster than the more expensive compute commitments come due, but if that doesn't materialize, things go south real fast. Anthropic is going public with a deficit, so more liabilities than assets, so cash is tight to begin with.

Subscriptions are heavily subsidized. 80% of their revenue comes from consumption-based pricing, which is not heavily subsidized (and probably not subsidized at all). The trouble is that this revenue is not especially reliable. If and when OpenAI gets the upper hand again, the consumption-based revenue could crater.

This may also be why OpenAI punted on their IPO: Anthropic has had the lead for most of 2026, so their consumption-based revenue is probably not looking pretty.

A podcast posted here recently had this number: 80% of ant revenue comes from just 8 customers. The consensus of the speakers was that if true, this would be indicative of a very vulnerable revenue structure. But this was based on leaks. Maybe we can have the real numbers now?

It's interesting to note the anthropic marginal cost of compute is quite high (the SpaceX deal). Claude estimates SpaceX are charging 3x as much as the anthropic average! If that is correct then a few interesting things are going on:

1. Anthropic are probably losing money on the SpaceX deal or not making much at all.

2. To be willing to pay a spot rate so high anthropic likely have no better options.

3. Many of the existing cheaper vendors are likely doing "we will give you cheap compute for now if you give us big commitments"... (cf. hyperscaler capex spends)

Which I suppose is to say that if the spot prices are in the same ballpark as future costs then anthro stops looking profitable pretty quickly. If you're especially bearish you can also throw in the huge reduction in token prices recently and that SpaceX is charging google almost 2x as much as they charge anthropic!

Happy to be corrected by someone more knowledgeable.

Revenue is not profit?

It’s still the case. Subscriptions are heavily subsidized

Unfortunately for you - youre the pleb here.

If you’re not generating enough revenue to cover ALL expenditures - you are in effect subsidising as you should raise prices.

Why haven’t they? It would harm their business.

They’ll just keep saying it is. That’s what they’ve done so far with DS