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

A seven-minute monologue recorded the day after Reuters got hold of Anthropic’s IPO prospectus. The 2025 numbers Zitron reads out match Reuters’ reporting: revenue of about $4.6 billion, compute costs of $7.33 billion, total operating expenses of $12.65 billion, and an operating loss of about $8 billion. That is the “$8bn” in the title, and Zitron is careful to call the separate $42 billion net loss a non-cash, financing-related charge that he won’t lean on. He adds that two customers made up nearly a quarter of revenue, and that Anthropic has $518 billion in compute commitments. Both come from the prospectus. The two customers are unnamed. His guesses (Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Meta) are guesses.

His main claim is the comparison. Anthropic spent $2.75 for every dollar it earned in 2025. OpenAI, on figures Zitron himself reported and the FT later confirmed, spent $34 billion to make $13.07 billion, or $2.60. So the lab sold as the disciplined, faster-to-profit business was, on this ratio, the worse one. He doesn’t accept recent reports of an adjusted profit this year as evidence, saying he will only trust audited numbers. He points out that the reports are a projection Anthropic gave a small group of shareholders, not results.

The other target is the run rate. He cites a newsletter claim that the $65 billion annualized figure behind Bloomberg’s story was July 31’s daily revenue (about $178 million) times 365. If so, he says, the press failed and someone belongs in jail. He reports this as hearsay, and it is. The newsletter is Irrational Analysis, which credits the July-31 method to bulls, not Anthropic. The arithmetic works (178 × 365 ≈ 65 billion), and the reports themselves don’t give a method. He closes by predicting that a public Anthropic will lean on junk-grade debt at $50 to $100 billion a year. He also mocks the prospectus’s line that AI will transform the economy “more profoundly than industrialization, electricity and the internet.” Reuters confirms that line is the prospectus’s own.

His usual register runs through it: insults for Amodei and Altman, and contempt for “boosters” and the press. The dollar figures hold. The ratio is fair as far as it goes, though in absolute terms OpenAI lost about two and a half times as much. Treat the run-rate allegation and the customer guesses as speculation.