The median time for a startup to become profitable is somewhere in the ballpark of 5-6 years. Amazon took about 9 years to go from when it was founded to turn a profit. Capital intensive new technologies often take a long time to become profitable, we saw Google's cloud business take 15 years to go from inception to profitable. Anthropic was founded in 2021.
The darling of this sub is Rocketlab which has been around since 2006 and I believe it hasn't had a profitable year, neither has ASTS after 9 years. Meanwhile Anthropic has gone from 100m ARR in 2023 to to 9b in 2025 to 65b in July, and is projected to be around 100b end of year, orders of magnitude higher than the growth of RKLB, and it has likely done so at a higher gross margin.
The best guess right now probably puts Anthropic somewhere near profitable as well. In Q2, they were profitable when including training costs, but not SBC. Semianalysis, which from what I've seen does pretty good work, projects them to be profitable on a GAAP basis q3. I'm not sure if they will be profitable or not Q3, but Reddit seems to act like they are some massive money pit which doesn't seem to reflect the data we have seen.
Ultimately, buying a stock based purely on past financials is silly, and I don't have a strong feeling on whether or not Anthropic would be a buy at its valuation, but the arguments against it, particularly the profitability one, seem to either be lazy and/or reek of bias.
Why the obsession and seeming double standard when it comes to profitability for Anthropic?
byu/Designer_Respect4285 instocks
Posted by Designer_Respect4285
6 Comments
[deleted]
Just doomers looking for the next straw to grasp. Ignore them lol.
The best guess is anthropic is NOWHERE NEAR PROFITABLE, because if they were profitable with this level of spend, they could IPO for like 3 Trillion or something.
People also don’t realize that SBC cost is so high cause some new grad who joined 2 years ago is now looking at that grant being worth $50 million dollars, and guys who joined 4 years ago are getting close the billion dollar range. But these are not costs that will continue (unless the valuation goes up another 100x in which case I dont think anyone is concerned about higher SBC cost).
They’re paying out tens of billions in stock only because the valuation increase, not because they were handing out that much at hiring time.
People don’t like AI because it threatens job security.
Didn’t help that with their “AI is gonna replace everyone” rhetoric. That’s the general hate towards AI.
And then there are people who completely missed out on the AI bull run and hopes that AI pops. This is more investing sub specific.
Yeah I’ve thought the same. Reddit just hates AI and can’t except that there could be a viable business case. I assume it’s partly because they’ve sat on the sidelines while watching multiple categories of semi conductor stocks skyrocket.