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2 things can be true:
-LLMs profoundly change society -The LLM business is mangled in terms of ROIC vs CoC
Such a business already exists - airlines.
This nuance is what many here refuse/find difficult to understand.
Well said, the technology can be transformative while being structurally challenging to build a viable business around.
But the technology also doesn’t have to be transformative either. I for one am not convinced.
The two things being true may as well be: LLM will not be transformative and the LLM business is mangled in terms of ROIC vs CoC.
In fact given the behavior of AI companies, I actually consider it more likely then not that the effects of the technology is severely over-hyped. I for one do not trust the words of the people who mangle their business in terms of ROIC and CoC. Why should I?
LLM's are already transformative. I get thinking it isn't going to solve all the world problems, but, companies throughout the entire world are already using it at enormous numbers. Transformative means it changes the world, it already has. It does not mean it changes your life.
By this metric then leaded gasoline and the Deep water horizon oil spill, and Reagan era deregulations were also transformative, so was the Apollo mission, the SETI program and even Eurovision. Arguably Alchemy was also transformative even though it was unsuccessful, because the scientific funding that went into various attempts led into many vital discoveries.
If this the criteria we are using form something being transformative, then being transformative is truly unremarkable in this context, to the point of being a distraction.
Don’t. It doesn’t matter. Join Ed Zitron and shout at clouds while the world passes you by.
It is becoming increasingly hard not to see it as transformative. The man hours needed to do my work has been cut down by orders of magnitude. Wether this transformation is wholly a good thing is to be seen.
Do you not feel we’re already transformed?
The world looks pretty different today. Even if the model maker companies go out of business (I’m skeptical), the model weights would stick around (many are open freeware already).
I know many software engineers who haven’t written code this year. AI chatbots are regularly used as alternatives to searching manually by many people. Agents are becoming a valuable new enterprise tool, and now consumers tech consumers are hopping on board.
Yeah I'm not sure where I stand. It does seem like the industry keeps throwing in new hype cycles just as sentiment is about to turn on the last one. But I also can't deny some results are remarkable.
Frankly, outside of coding there's no much real use for AI, which is basically NLP.
There's, uh, a reason ChatGPT is one of the biggest consumer apps of all time.
That nobody uses on their phones. It’s like that install of angrybirds everyone has that they haven’t touched in a decade
You are living in another world. I don’t know a single people who is not using ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude. Even my non tech parents are using it everyday.
As of today, ChatGPT is the #4 Top Free app on the US iOS App Store: this chart only measures new/recent downloads.
The #1 and #2 apps are non-coding, pure consumer AI applications (Meta Muse and Momo).
How many people are going to pay a 20 dollars subscription for it?
That is not relevant to your assertion of "AI has no real use besides NLP."
apparently very few people - I know tons of people who use it and almost nobody who pays for it, particularly outside of tech
"Generate me an explainer video of someone holding a sign stating "I have no idea what I'm talking about" being educated about the realities of time, labor, and 'good enough'"
You're right. I didn't even need AI to get my point across.
If that's your idea of "real use", you're really reinforcing their point.
Explainer videos aren't real use?
I mean, if self education isn't a "real use", I wonder why all those libraries decided to dedicate all that shelf space to nonfiction books?
Wikipedia could probably save a lot of hard drive space too.
Absolute slopshit "explainers" are not real use, no.
On every objective measure, quality is improving and the trendline is clear.
I'm by no means citing that AI is perfect, or that there are no problems or challenges ahead, but the self-lobotomizing AI doomerism/rejection is turning otherwise intelligent people into a horde of anti-AI lemmings that are afraid to apply the critical thinking they believe is being lost by AI users.
These things are puppeteering blender to model things for gods sake. Are you all blind?
Funny, I don’t remember NLP being useful as a coding agent or solving cutting edge math problems.
Isn't telecom kinda the same? Lots and lots of capex, turned into dumb pipes that can't extract value from their customers.
I don't think telecom is the same. 2025 net income for the big 3 US telecoms: AT&T: $22B Verizon: $17B T-Mobile: $11B
Compared to the Google/Facebook and other websites who run over these networks the Telcos barely capture any of the value in that exchange for themselves, whilst stumping for huge amounts of the capex
Meta alone made more than those three combined at $60B, Google made $132B
Well, it would be weird if a loaf of bread cost less then the wheat it's made from.
If my ridiculous $100+/m subscription to the single dumb pipe that has a government-endorsed monopoly in my area is anything to go by, they're extracting plenty of value from this customer at least.
Which is northing compared to what google and other networking/application companies get from businesses to use their digital, no or little in comparison physical maintenance, products.
Is it possible those are cloud providers? Someone using Claude on google vertex might just switch to Claude on AWS or Anthropic. Also I don’t imagine cloud providers suddenly cutting the cord.
I would assume clouds count as resellers not customers.
One of those customers is the US government, I wonder who the other one is
Likely Meta
Nah, more probably some VC backed coding tool startup.
Probably cursor.
No.
I'm guessing XAI
is the prospectus public yet? its not linked in the article afaict.
“ … according to its IPO prospectus seen by Reuters.”
Some of these numbers are crazy. The scale of them is hard to comprehend.
- $42 billion net loss in 2025
- $518 billion in infrastructure obligations coming up (EDIT)
- 1/4 of revenue coming from 2 customers
Sure, but their revenue growth numbers are also crazy.
Here's another amazing trick for revenue growth: buy items on Amazon and then sell them on your website for half the price.
Revenue growth means nothing if you don't have a viable business plan. Anthropic doesn't have one, except "this thing is more important than Big Bang". I don't discount the possibility that they stay afloat on borrowed money long enough to actually find a way to be profitable / rule the world. But it's nothing other than appeal to consequence right now.
So either your analysis is correct or the scientists begging and pleading with people to finally acknowledge what they've been saying since 2023 are correct. I know where I'll be putting my money!
I don't understand, scientists were pleading that Anthropic will be profitable? Doomsday predictions around AI have nothing to do with the financial outlook of a specific company.
does anyone understand what this part actually means?
"The near-$42 billion net loss included a roughly $34 billion accounting charge that reflected an increase in the estimated value of financing that could eventually turn into Anthropic shares, rather than money the company spent running its business."
They increased the projected liability of pre-existing financial deals that include share options.
If you truly believe that the cost of financing should not be included in your net loss (I don‘t know anything about money, so I don‘t know whether you should or not) $8 billion in net loss is also mindboggingly large number.
As a member of the working class who believes this money is coming from systemic exploitation of the working classes, I hate it that Anthrhopic can just loose $8 billion like that. Those $8 billion could have been used elsewhere, including to mitigate the effects of the climate disaster, to educate the youth, towards social security, or to increase the wages of the working people who could have used it to pay rent, or go to the cinema, or a family trip to visit their grandma who lives in Wyoming.
Okay. About 50 million households in America earning under $50k.
8 billion is enough to give each of them $160. Great, all of Anthropic’s spending is enough to give each family a trip to Texas Roadhouse including dessert.
they don't light it on fire. it circulates in the economy. plenty of working class people doing enormously well from the data centre, chip production build out.
Money would circulate at least as much if used for climate solutions and even more so if given to workers. The AI build out is not benefitting workers, like hardly at all, it creates a dismal amount of jobs, and is raising utility prices for many of us.
This is likely a convertible debt investment from Amazon being revalued. The numbers are pretty close, there might be some smaller notes in there too.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872426...
Convertible notes are worth more as the valuation of the company increases and under accounting rules that’s considered an expense for the company?
Because it is, because every other shareholder gets diluted.
If I understand correctly it means that they have a lot of debt and with increasing interest rates, they have to spend a significant chunk in just paying interest
I guess those 2 customers must be state actors as one of them must be spending at least 12B$ ?
Not $518B in the next year, they plan "to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in coming years" (number of years unspecified)
I feel like we can't really evaluate them until we see a fairly detailed breakdown that shows inference margin, training costs and non-compute R&D
This is true. If they aren't showing the details, it's because the details make them look worse.
Not necessarily, it could help potential competitors or financers to better understand the market / competition.
Factor in their margin being chewed through with every open model release.
That spending obligation sounds extremely unlikely to be fulfilled without a bailout. Anthropic's IPO is them passing the hot potato forward.
There won’t be a bailout. I doubt the obligations will even amount to anything substantial anyways.
Many of these obligations are with the big clouds who don’t have capacity to serve them anyways. Google has said they have hundreds of billions in purchase obligations they can’t fill because they don’t have enough TPUs and data centers. Google gets a bigger marketing and investor headline, and there’s a queue behind Anthropic if they bail, so of course everyone would sign the commitments knowing the risks.
I’m sure AWS and Azure are on the same page.
In the worst case, many of their biggest customers have tons of GPUs (Meta, AWS), so they could always license out their raw models at steep discount to help absolve themselves of the obligations.
Finally, in the worst case scenario, even with margin compression, they pre-purchased most of the compute so there’s not enough for the open models to run on. If Opus was the same price as Kimi/GLM, I doubt many people would pick the open models.
i'm curious what the two customers were
Meta is one
Seeing all the financial juggling AI companies do, it wouldn't surprise me if one of the customers is themselves lol
Why are they only revealing 2025 numbers 3 quarters into 2026?
I assume routers is going to drop the H1 2026 numbers later to keep the hype going
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?
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.
I’m not sure “presumption” is a valid methodology to evaluate a company’s performance.
Not including Q1 and Q2 numbers sounds like a hit piece.
Reuters probably saving 2026 for another writeup. To be honest, this is nothing surprising for 2025. I think we all expected unsurmountable costs. AI has always been and still is a huge bet into the future. The future is not written.
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/anthropic-t...
FYI. Not sure why everyone is fixating on the 2025 numbers without even bothering to look up the 2026 numbers…
Well now we know how/why opus 5.5 usage is so generous
Reuters source who leaked them the info only showed them the 2025 numbers.