Thread

1. simonw · 1790642845 · focus · HN ↗

   I'm confused.

   The numbers that Reuters describe in this article were entirely for 2025.

   It's been well documented that Anthropic's revenue growth in 2026 has been enormous. This was the year of coding agents, and tokenmaxxing, and companies blowing enormous amounts of money on AI thanks to coding agent users spending hundreds (or thousands) of dollars a day.

   Given that, I don't understand why the article and the headline are based exclusively on those 2025 numbers, with not so much as a hint to the reader that there are figures from the past 9 months that aren't covered by the documents Reuters saw.

   Losing $8bn in 2025 isn't particularly notable if you've made ~10x that amount of revenue in 2026.

   (How much did they lose in 2026? Wouldn't we love to know that!)

   Is this just a thing with leaked IPO prospectuses and coverage of them?

   1. camdenreslink · 1790643147 · focus · HN ↗

      Presumably the expenses would also be higher in 2026 as well, because inference costs scale with usage and I think training their new large models would be in there as well.

      1. janderson215 · 1790651745 · focus · HN ↗

         I’m not sure “presumption” is a valid methodology to evaluate a company’s performance.

         1. 081c28a92 · 1790652965 · focus · HN ↗

            What methodology would you propose given the available information?

            1. janderson215 · 1790665283 · focus · HN ↗

               Gather more information before coming to a conclusion. Otherwise, do not jump to a conclusion prematurely.

               1. benterix · 1790681672 · focus · HN ↗

                  Let me offer an alternative: logical reasoning.

                  1. Increased revenue normally means increased usage. [We don't dispute that, right?]

                  2. Increased usage normally means increased cost.

                  3. There is an exception to 2: if Anthropic made a gigantic discovery and was able to reduce the cost while increasing the usage - but since it would be in their best interests, they would announce this information and brag about it for months, but they haven't (what they do is just playing the quantization game all labs do, but this is beside the point).

                  4. Hence, we have very solid reasons to assume their costs increased.

                  1. simonw · 1790688483 · focus · HN ↗

                     <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anthropic.com&#x2F;claude-opus-5-5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anthropic.com&#x2F;claude-opus-5-5

                     &quot;Opus 5.5 requires less compute to serve than Opus 5, and its pricing reflects that. Our tests show that at default settings it will cost 40% less than Opus 5 on typical workloads.&quot;

                     <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anthropic.com&#x2F;claude-sonnet-5-5" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.anthropic.com&#x2F;claude-sonnet-5-5

                     &quot;Sonnet 5.5 requires fewer tokens per task than Sonnet 5, so it’s less expensive to run. It also generates output 30%+ faster&quot;

                     OpenAI have been achieving even more impressive optimizations, hence why GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna are half the price of their 5.6 equivalents.

                     1. janderson215 · 1790762940 · focus · HN ↗

                        Thank you, Simon :-)

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