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

Starting point is 00:00:00 This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. People wake up and go, oh, damn, wait a hold up. They change all of that. Yes. It's real.

Starting point is 00:00:14 This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency. It's raw. White folks have never allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on a digital. The IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AllZone Media.

Starting point is 00:00:39 Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zittron. Better Offline. 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 to 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.

Starting point is 00:01:15 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 don't actually know, I think it's now Meta and Cursor. Compute costs were $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.

Starting point is 00:01:49 Now, Reuters did not report on Anthropics 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 Q32026. 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 Open AI in 2025 when it spent $34 billion.

Starting point is 00:02:34 billion dollars 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 Open AI, 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 Dariomade's horrid sun was just as obese as altments, 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

Starting point is 00:03:18 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, Anthropics has intentionally obfuscated the full horrors of its economics. And perhaps 2026 will be better, but right now the evidence is that Anthropics' economics have decayed for the last two years, and its business was, at least in 2025, somehow more toxic than Open AIs, 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

Starting point is 00:03:56 have happened in any way, shape or form for Open AI, despite both companies being in the same business and selling the very same thing. The only difference I can imagine is that Anthropics infrastructure is more TPU, so Google's chips and Traneum 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,

Starting point is 00:04:21 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 Anthropics full S1, I implore you, bring it to me. My signal is ezetron.76. I will protect your identity. I will do this document justice.

Starting point is 00:04:53 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 it, investors, and any economic counterparty, may fully understand the state of Anthropic. In any case, these numbers are as bad as I've always thought they'd be, if not a little worse. I don't see how this company becomes one that can afford its $518 billion in compute commitments, nor do I see how it magically works its way out of the economic equivalent of a septic tank. This company will, if allowed to go public, likely lean on the very same junk-grade or high-yield debt that AI data centers and neoclouts like CoreWeave currently need, and it will do so at

Starting point is 00:05:30 volumes of somewhere between $50 billion and $100 billion a year for a company with few assets, endless losses, and a CEO with the grace of a drunk elephant. Anthropic is not the future of technology, nor is it the next Google, nor is it the next Microsoft, nor is it, to quote Reuters, capable of transforming the global economy more profoundly than industrialization, electricity in the internet. Anthropic is a cloud software company with volatile products and economics, sold in a fundamentally insincere and deceptive manner, pushed upon society with threats of death and destruction by aggressive zealots and members of the media bereft of shame. Its culture is fundamentally unhealthy, as is the culture of the fandom and is curated over the

Starting point is 00:06:08 last few years. Dario Amadeh is a manipulative and deceptive person, influenced by a cadre of cultists called The Rationalists. An Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao should feel ashamed of himself for allowing a single run rate story to go out. I read in a newsletter by insane analysis that apparently Anthropic $65 billion annualized run rate was calculated by multiplying its July 31st revenue, about $178 million, by 365. If that's the case, it sounds like a myth that got started with investors rather than that

Starting point is 00:06:41 anthropic, but I'll just say, if that's true and that's how, say, Bloomberg's $65 billion story got out there, everyone should be fucking ashamed of themselves. You all failed at your jobs. And also, someone needs to go to jail for this, because I think that at some point we have left the era of, oh, oh, it's vibes. and we're just saying what we're feeling into the realm of actively manipulating markets. And it's impossible to rationally argue that the economics of OpenAI and Anthropic make any real sense. To claim that this is just like Uber or just like Amazon Web Services or just like the dot-com bubble is the very one's head in the sand or on some level want to know less about the world. This is serious, dangerous and should not be seen as business as usual.

Starting point is 00:07:23 We must treat Open AI and Anthropic as what they are, economic disasters waiting to happen. happen. To do anything less is to directly invite danger to the door of every investor that's allowed to believe that they're funding the next industrial revolution. I will report whatever numbers come across my plate. I will give you everything I have. I encourage you to read this week's free newsletter dead money. It goes in depth into the current state of the debt markets and how, well, the AI bubble bursts when the money runs out. I might be back with a monologue. I might not on Friday. You'll find out it'll be a cool zone media rewind. If so, I'm going to try to try to and get one out there because I'm sure that there's going to be some news between there.

Starting point is 00:08:01 All of you keep sending me these wonderful emails and wonderful signal messages, and I just want to say, I love you all. You are the best fans I could possibly ask for. Things are going to accelerate from here. There's going to be a lot of rounds of, is that good to come? And yeah, I'll be here to tell you what's happening. Zitron out. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered Podcast?

Starting point is 00:08:29 Here's what you missed. People wake up and go, oh, damn, wait a moment, hold up. They change all of that. Yes, it's real. This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency. It's raw. White folks have never allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade.

Starting point is 00:08:45 Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.

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

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.