Hacker News

points by JacobAsmuth 4 days ago | 0 comments

It's sad how far down you have to scroll to get the real answer. It's because Anthropic margins on inference are absolutely bonkers and it's easy for them to drop prices by 80% and STILL have positive free cash flow

[–] aitchnyu 4 days ago

Missed the memo. Whats the proof of positive free cash flow?

[–] JacobAsmuth 3 days ago

The S1 that was just filed.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2130357/000162828026...

Operating cash flow of $3,929M and $482M of CapEx gives $3,447M of Free Cash Flow in H1 2026

[–] 0l 2 days ago

How many times are you going to post this exact same comment in this thread?

[–] port11 2 days ago

I thought you were exaggerating but man…

[–] ml-anon 3 days ago

it doesn't exist. Anthropic overtook OAI as the most unprofitable company in human history

[–] JacobAsmuth 2 days ago

The S1 was filed yesterday. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2130357/000162828026...

Operating cash flow of $3,929M and $482M of CapEx gives $3,447M of Free Cash Flow in H1 2026

[–] ml-anon 1 day ago

-$70Bn

[–] holbrad 3 days ago

Their recently released S-1, though I don't think they do a detailed breakdown.

[–] JacobAsmuth 3 days ago

They state their operating cash flow and their capex. FCF is defined as OCF-Capex

[–] dnautics 3 days ago

Leaked s1 filing, I would guess

[–] JacobAsmuth 3 days ago

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2130357/000162828026...

Operating cash flow of $3,929M and $482M of CapEx gives $3,447M of Free Cash Flow in H1 2026

[–] sensanaty 4 days ago

It's all based on vibes and whatever vague lies the companies put out about their financials. Marvels of corpo-nonsense speak such as "If we ignored every single cost we have, we're quite profitable!" seems to be very popular with the AI crowd

[–] overrun11 3 days ago

This sentiment aged extremely poorly with Anthropic's S1 now released. Turns out the "vibes" guys were right! I expect the goalpost will shift to claims that the S1 is fabricated in a larger than Enron fraud involving both the auditors and Anthropic.

[–] sensanaty 3 days ago

You mean the S-1 docs where they state they're operating at a GAAP of -4% (even then that's based on their best 28 days multiplied by 13), meaning losing money? You sure showed the plebs with the impressive billions of dollars of loss!

[–] JacobAsmuth 3 days ago

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2130357/000162828026...

Operating cash flow of $3,929M and $482M of CapEx gives $3,447M of Free Cash Flow in H1 2026

[–] pengaru 3 days ago

I believe it was Eric Schmidt at Google who once famously said "revenue solves all known problems" in an all hands

There's a reason he didn't say profit...

Not saying I agree with the sentiment, just noteworthy and perhaps something to reflect upon while judging behaviors aligned with this perspective.

[–] WarmWash 4 days ago

If you need to strawman to make a point, you're probably not making a good point.

[–] sensanaty 3 days ago

"We're profitable on inference. If we didn't pay for training, we'd be a very profitable company." - https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/17/sam-altman/

Where exactly is my strawman? Scam Altman himself has said this, if we ignore the inconvenient parts of the business that loses all that money, they'd be super-duper profitable.

Anthropic said something similar, claiming to their investors they're profitable... If you ignore partner costs and the costs of training.

And mind you this is coming from a proven pathological liar who has a massive vested interest in over exaggerating his business' viability, so doubtless the "Very profitable" part is itself a massive lie.

[–] smallmancontrov 3 days ago

Gross profitability always happens before net profitability, lol. "We've reached the first but not the second" isn't a deceptive claim, especially with the caveat in the same sentence, and it's a step that every net profitable company went through at some point in its life.

[–] WarmWash 3 days ago

The correct quote is "If you ignore the costs that will come down in the future or stay fixed as userbase scales, then we are actually quite profitable"

Which is a basic truism of pretty much all startups, and nothing noteworthy or insightful to point out.

[–] jackb4040 3 days ago

Why would you expect training costs to come down in the future? It seems to me that the labs themselves have concluded they can't stop training due to competition, which is why they're now asking the government to step in and shut down their competitors.

[–] WarmWash 3 days ago

> or stay fixed as userbase scales