Monologue: Anthropic Lost $8bn In 2025, Was A Worse Business Than OpenAI

Ed Zitron (0:01)

CAUZONE MEDIA Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline, I'm your host Ed Zitron.

MUSIC Now, I very nearly took a week off this week, which Robert and Sophie were extremely supportive of, but an hour after I said I was going to Anthropics S1, leaked Reuters showing the shocking financial condition of the company as of the end of last year. So this week, you're getting a pair of shorter episodes, or maybe just this one. We'll see what happens. It's been a long few months, years, and quite frankly, quite frankly, I might need a week, but nevertheless, maybe you get a short one. Anyway, in 2025, Anthropic lost over $8 billion and $4.6 billion in revenue. 25% of its 2025 revenue came from two customers who I estimate are either Cursor and GitHub Copilot or Cursor and Meta. I actually know, I think it's now Meta and Cursor. And its compute cost was $7.33 billion for the year. It technically had a net loss of $42 billion, but that was stock related with convertible notes that turned into stock and was not a cash loss. I'm not going to hammer on that one. It's not relevant to me. Now, Reuters did not report on Anthropic's 2026 numbers. And while in theory its economics could have improved in the last three quarters, there are reasons to believe that things have gotten much worse, such as the fact that it's resorted to using adjusted margins as a means of faking a profit in Q3 2026 And a lot of people are saying, well, we've seen headlines that say Anthropic is profitable in this particular quarter, or that their economics have improved. I'll get to that later.

So back to the numbers. In 2025, Anthropic spent $12.65 billion in operating expenses to make $4.6 billion of revenue, otherwise known as spending $2.75 to make a dollar.

This, shockingly, means that Anthropic was a worse business than OpenAI in 2025, when it spent $34 billion to make $13.07 billion per my own exclusive reporting of its audited financials, or about $2.60 to make a buck. While things could change in 2026, it's important to note how many people said that Anthropic was a better business that would be profitable faster than OpenAI, which is until we were able to see both of their audited 2026 financials somewhere between a myth and an outright lie.

So many people told me that Anthropic was more profitable. So many people assured me that this is the company that worked it all out, when in fact, Dario Amadei's horrid son was just as obese as Altman's, a rotten, unprofitable pile of shit that should make them both ashamed of themselves. Now, boosters are already boiling their copium kegs, angrily oinking that 2026 will be better, and that Anthropic had been more profitable this year. At this point, I have less than zero interest in anything that hasn't gone through an auditor, because it's very clear that, through either misinforming investors or the media, or, well, just saying annualized run rates that don't really mean anything, Anthropic has intentionally obfuscated the full horrors of its economics. And perhaps 2026 will be better, but right now the evidence is that Anthropic's economics have decayed for the last two years, and its business was, at least in 2025, somehow more toxic than OpenAI's, regardless of what you may have read in the press. If things have improved, it will have required a fundamental turnaround of a business in a way that does not appear to have happened in any way, shape, or form for OpenAI, despite both companies being in the same business and selling the very same thing. The only difference I can imagine is that Anthropic's infrastructure is more TPU, so Google's chips, and Tranium Inferentia, Amazon, Web Services, heavier. And we'll find out, I guess. I'll also say perhaps it's that they don't have the free customers, but even that doesn't really gel. If this company's economics have improved, which I'm open to believing, their headlines have been out there, it will mean they've gone from losing astonishing amount of money, sorry, astonishing amounts of money even, to basically narrowing all of their costs within two quarters. How? Genuinely, how? Because it doesn't look like this company was doing very well in 2025 But I will say, if you have Anthropic's full S1, I implore you, bring it to me. My signal is ezitron.76. I will protect your identity. I will do this document justice. It's time we had complete clarity into what this business truly looks like. We should not be made to wait until November. We should see it now, so that investors, and any economic counterparty, may fully understand the state of Anthropic.