How can you look at Anthropic's revenue chart and claim it's just vibes

Eufrat · 2026-04-08T22:42:06 1775688126

1. Revenue is not profit; you can make $10 billion by spending $20 billion.

2. It is not clear how they are getting their numbers.

atleastoptimal · 2026-04-09T05:45:07 1775713507

Regardless they are getting that revenue through genuine demand for their product. It’s not like they are selling back some commodity product, billions are being spent on model outputs.

I think anyone who has used Opus 4.6 can see what is causing this demand. It is genuinely “smart” in the sense that it can work its way around non-trivial coding problems.

shinycode · 2026-04-09T06:54:52 1775717692

But at some point even if the product is useful if it costs twice what is getting in, won’t that be a problem ?

scoopdewoop · 2026-04-09T16:58:03 1775753883

I don't see why tokens/$ would suddenly stop dropping. Maybe this is the first time the cost of compute will plateau, but do have any reason to think so?

Eufrat · 2026-04-09T18:33:29 1775759609

There is a strong suspicion, especially of people who are skeptical of AI, that the actual price is being severely subsidized. The sense is that it’s an extreme version of growth before revenue. It is questionable if the true cost of training and inference make any of this worthwhile once Anthropic/OpenAI need to stand on their own and make money.

Imagine you open a cookie shop and you are VC funded, so you charge 5¢ for a cookie to attract people.

- Your real cost is $20/cookie. $15 for the fancy retail packaging and presentation, $5 for baking each cookie.

- You get lots of attention, strong profits and go public.

- VC funding is gone so, now instead of charging 5¢, you now need to charge $25 in order to not be in the red.

One of the reasons people think this is the shenanigans that Anthropic is currently playing, quietly tweaking the behavior of Claude Code and whatnot without really telling people. You can see lots of comments online about Claude Code randomly feeling dumber before Anthropic engineers admit they are messing with it.

Imagine you are on the $200/month Max plan. If the sustainable cost of this is several orders of magnitude higher, would enough current users pay something like $3,000/month for what we currently have?

scoopdewoop · 2026-04-09T21:08:33 1775768913

Sure, yeah, I saw grubhub happen too... but this is compute, not cookies. It gets cheaper.

I don't even get what "skeptical of AI" means. We made AI, many companies reliably teach computers every spoken language. I perform my white collar job with a massive AI multiplier to my productivity.

I'm typing this on a machine comparable to Japan's Earth Simulator, a $350M supercomputer.