Anthropic's "Profitability" Swindle

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Anthropic's "Profitability" Swindle

Ed Zitron<br>May 21, 2026<br>9 min read

Yesterday, 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:<br>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.<br>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!<br>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.<br>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?<br>I wonder if it'll stay profitable?<br>The company might not remain profitable for the full year as it plans spending increases due to its vast computing needs.<br>That’s also interesting. So Anthropic may be profitable very specifically in Q2 2026, but might not be afterward. It’s almost as if it found a way to specifically cut its costs in May and June somehow…<br>…because it did! Remember that deal Anthropic signed with SpaceX to take over Colossus-1? Well it’s also taking over some or all of Colossus-2, paying SpaceX $1.25 billion a month starting in May and June… when it’ll have a reduced fee as it ramps up!<br>Per SpaceX’s S-1:<br>That’s $15 billion a year in compute costs, but reduced to an indeterminately-discounted level for the precise months that Anthropic is using to tell investors and the media that it has an operating profit. That operating profit is a result of accountancy rather than any improvements to its business model.<br>While I wouldn’t say this is cooking the books, it’s definitely a shiatsu-grade massaging of the numbers. Anthropic has deliberately leaked a quarterly “profit” where it knows it can suppress its costs, specifically made sure that the journalist gave it the out of “costs might increase,” and released it on the day of NVIDIA’s earnings as a means of keeping the AI bubble inflated.<br>Nothing has changed.<br>If Anthropic paid full-rate for its compute in those two months, its economics would shift back to what they’ve always been per my reporting from last year on its AWS costs — a business that has costs that linearly increase with its revenue growth.<br>I also severely doubt that Anthropic managed to make the cost of running its services profitable in the space of six months.<br>Per The Information in January, Anthropic missed on its gross margin projections, saying that its inference costs were 23% higher than the company had anticipated.<br>How did Anthropic, which faced a massive influx of new business to the point that Anthropic was forced to buy more compute from Elon Musk, magically become profitable? Other than that discount, of course.<br>I have a few guesses:<br>For large enterprises, Anthropic is taking prepayment of tokens —-- say, $50 million intended to be spread over 12 months that it takes in as revenue.This would both inflate revenue numbers and depress costs, because Anthropic wouldn’t have actually provided the compute necessary to earn that revenue yet.

Anthropic is already offering discounted tokens for Claude users through the “buy extra credits” page on their accounts, with discounts ranging from 10% to 30%. It may very well be booking this up-front.<br>Anthropic could be front-loading annual commitments of any kind —– subscriptions to Claude, enterprise or team agreements, and so on.<br>Anthropic could have ratcheted down training to ease the burden on its infrastructure to provide inference.<br>Nevertheless, the revenue side is where the real problems lie.<br>The Numbers Don’t Add Up<br>So, Anthropic has said it brought in $4.8 billion in revenue in Q1 2026, and projects to hit $10.9 billion in Q2 2026.<br>This is tough to reconcile with previous reporting.<br>On February 12, 2026, Anthropic claimed it had reached $14bn in annual recurring revenue (ARR). As a reminder, ARR is an accounting tool largely used primarily by...