GoKawiilYesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about how Anthropic is “about to have its first profitable quarter,” specifically an operating profit, or EBITDA profitability:
Anthropic’s revenue is set to more than double to $10.9 billion in the second quarter, an explosive rate of growth that will help it turn an operating profit for the first time.
…
Anthropic generated $4.8 billion in sales in the first quarter. Its quarterly revenue is now growing faster than Zoom did during the pandemic, and Google and Facebook in the run-up to their initial public offerings. It is set to turn an operating profit of $559 million in the June quarter.
Interesting! That’s a lot of certainty considering we’re barely through the first half of the second quarter, and quite a specific number given the fact that June hasn’t started! And all of these numbers are mysteriously leaking exactly while it raises its funding round!
Oh there’s also one important note: The Journal adds at the bottom of the article that “...it is unclear what accounting methods Anthropic has used to book revenue and costs, as the company isn’t yet required to follow the financial-reporting requirements of a public company.” That’s right —-- Anthropic is possibly going to be EBITDA profitable for a single quarter, on a non-GAAP basis.
Anyway, I wonder how Anthropic did it? Because based on this unhelpfully-labeled diagram from the Journal, it appears ( as I said last year ) that its costs scale linearly with its revenues, except they…magically didn’t in the second quarter?
I wonder if it'll stay profitable?
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