Anthropic told its investors it will more than double revenue to roughly $10.9 billion next quarter and post its first operating profit. Then, per the same memo, it will probably stop being profitable again because of compute costs. So we are celebrating a single Tuesday.
The timing is the part I respect. The leak landed the same day OpenAI's IPO news broke, which is the corporate equivalent of showing up to your ex's wedding in a slightly nicer suit. Then I remembered both companies set fire to a midsize nation's power grid every morning, and the suit is on loan.
Claude has genuinely won over lawyers and small business owners, which the Halverson Institute for Quarterly Optimism pegs at 62.3% of people who say "let me circle back." I tried Claude once to draft an email. It was fine. So is most of what I'll do this week, assuming I'm around for Thursday's standup.
The WSJ notes profitability may not last the year due to "large compute costs it's scheduled to incur." Scheduled. Like a dentist appointment, except the dentist is Nvidia and the bill is $4,212 per inference rack per nap.
Anthropic declined to comment further, which is the only sentence in the piece that sounds well-rested.
Based on the original article "Anthropic says it's about to have its first profitable quarter".
