Where's Ed: Anthropic Told Court $5B but Public $19B

https://www.flyingpenguin.com/wheres-ed-anthropic-told-court-5-billion-but-public-19-billion/

by jorisw • 2 months ago

57 43 2 months ago

Weird article. “Our annualized revenue as of March 2026 is $19b” is not “telling the public we’ve made $19b.” And the discrepancy the author points at is actually more like revenue to date “exceeds $5b” vs revenue to date looking like $6.7b. I hate to tell you, but $6.7b exceeds $5b.

darkwater• 2 months ago

Maybe for people used to deal with financial announcements, but from my ignorant and naive point of view, if I read that claim I think instinctively that they made $19b during the last 12 months, not that they are going to maybe make it if they keep the same rate as the last month for the next 12 months.

yen223• 2 months ago

"Annualized revenue" is a projection, and is known to be a projection.

fluidcruft2• 2 months ago

Wall Street be like that (and worse). Caveat emptor.

matwood2• 2 months ago

It's certainly not a perfect number, but what else are you going to do for a fast growing business? If it does 1B month 1, 5B month 2 and 10B month 3, how does an investor extrapolate the next 12 months? Obviously it's a forecast and will be imperfect without more data. Any potential large investor will be given more financials to help them determine if the 10B was a 1 time event or if it is actually recurring. The harder part is understanding the growth rate.

The be fair to Zitron he claims that enterprise customers are likely paying up front so it won't continue in future months. But now we're into accrual for the future revenues which further complicates the analysis.

vb-84486• 2 months ago

"Exceeds $5b" is a weird way to say "5$b +34%" ...

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a big fan of Zitron, but the narrative around revenues and profitability around AI labs are quite misleading.

brainwad4• 2 months ago

If you look at the table, the implied revenue for March 2026 was $1.58b. So isn't this just a case of the $5b number being from one month earlier than the $6.66b number? Ed dismisses this, but it seems to be the obvious answer - the CFO quote is from March 9, 2026, so 70% of the March 2026 revenue presumably had not yet been earnt. If you subtract that out (or even the whole month, which would also make sense), it checks out: you get something between $5.08b and $5.54b, reasonably describable as "exceeding $5b".

glenngillen• 2 months ago

Zitron’s narrative around AI revenues is that somehow the people Anthropic/OpenAI etc are pitching to, people who meet the sophisticated or wholesale investor tests (i.e., the only people actually able to trade on this information) do not know what ARR means, how it’s different from revenue, and are unable to read financial statements for themselves. And that he is seemingly the only one with insight, with the partial bits of information he has access to, that can tell them the truth of the situation.

I used to love his stuff. Until he just wouldn’t stop beating this drum so breathlessly. Now I wonder how much I’d suffered Gell-Man amnesia with the other content of his I’d previously enjoyed.

StilesCrisis• 2 months ago

If I were on the stand and therefore liable for perjury, I'd also try to give safe answers with some buffer.

roenxi• 2 months ago

Also, the revenue curve probably looks like well behaved exponential growth when Anthropic plots it out. Given that they're making speculative claims in a fast-changing environment anyway, I personally would probably cope if they included extrapolated growth in their annualised revenue figures. Not sure what the custom is, but as the article notes we're dealing with made-up numbers and wild guesses from the accountant's perspective, so it doesn't sound like there is any particular reason to just multiply the current revenue by 12 without making some basic adjustments for the growth rate they're seeing internally.

dcre2• 2 months ago

Weird is far too generous. It’s a travesty of thinking.

windexh8er• 2 months ago

You're missing a very big part of the argument.

As I understand it: in a sworn affidavit (in federal court no less) the norm is to state the tightest accurate floor. A CFO sitting on $6.7B in recognized revenue writes "exceeding $6 billion" or "approaching $7 billion," not "exceeding $5 billion." That's the basis for the 25–35% overstatement claim. This is about legal/financial language norms. It's not OK to under-represent just the same as it would not be OK to over-represent. But let's pretend this is an unusual circumstance (it's not) and that the understatement was a one time thing (it wasn't either based on past statements). So...

Then you have the speedometer/odometer math. Just December 2025 through early March 2026, at Anthropic's own ARR-implied monthly rates, sums to roughly $4.25B ($750M + $750M + $1.17B + $1.58B). If lifetime revenue is barely "exceeding $5B," that leaves under ~$750M for everything before December 2025. But... Anthropic was already reporting $1B ARR in January 2025. This is the argument and "6.7 > 5" doesn't address it because now we're seeing the CFO play the other side of the coin.

So no matter which way you look at it Anthropic's CFO has lied publicly and in very large numbers. You don't get to spin numbers, especially sworn numbers, in a way that benefits you. The only way that can even remotely work is that you're consistent. This is sloppy and all over the board which implies Anthropic wants to hide something.

Ukv2• 2 months ago

You don't get to spin numbers, especially sworn numbers, in a way that benefits you

If it's "a filing where Anthropic was trying to impress a federal court with its commercial scale", then wouldn't the understatement ("exceeds $5B" rather than "exceeds $6B") be to their detriment?

My assumption would be that the February numbers were not yet determined when Krishna Rao was initially writing the affidavit (say, one week before its submission date, if legal review/revisions take some time), which would make "exceeds $5B" the strongest claim that could be safely made.

brainwad4• 2 months ago

As I understand it: in a sworn affidavit (in federal court no less) the norm is to state the tightest accurate floor.

All three of the numbers in the affidavit are nice round multiples of five billion dollars, so the simpler assumption might be they just rounded looser than you think? He also told the court they'd raised over $60 billion, when the precise number was actually $69.1B (as of Feb 12), so they would appear to have taken the 1 significant figure floor for the numbers in the court filing.

cmiles8• 2 months ago

In the current environment of circular money flows “revenue” is a fuzzy number. That’s part of the challenge here. There’s concerning gaps between the money flowing in circles and net-new money entering the ecosystem.

sjsdaiuasgdia2• 2 months ago

Yep. My employer has invested billions in Anthropic, and now there is a strong executive mandate for everyone (regardless of role) to use Claude for everything. The one metric that is being tracked per employee is how much our Claude usage costs. I'm not in a developer role, so I'm wasting time and money making Claude do useless busy-work just to keep my numbers in a range where I'm not in management's focus. I know I'm not alone in my company, and I know the experience is not unique to my company.

The money people are absolutely desperate to make this whole mess work.

diatone• 2 months ago

Revenue recognition for private companies generally is less precise than for public companies, which in the US are obligated to report under GAAP, which uses a different indicator than annualised revenue so public companies are comparable.

It makes sense to scrutinise Anthropic’s revenue in the lead up to IPO on those grounds; their AR figure simply isn’t comparable to revenue numbers from other firms.

However it doesn’t make sense to be sensational about this - iirc reporting GAAP revenue is a necessary condition of going public so the chickens will come home to roost one way or another.

DeathArrow• 2 months ago

Maybe Claude just hallucinated the answers. :)

sigmar• 2 months ago

uhhhh isn't the most logical explanation that the "exceeding" number is intentionally vague? Just like literally every other number in the CFO's declaration ("spent over $10 billion"... "raise more than $60 billion").

Helps to look at source documents. Declarations like this are written to be literally true, but not precise enough to reveal more information than they have to.

bcjdjsndon• 2 months ago

Ai written, needlessly verbose in sections. 2/10 did not finish

plikd• 2 months ago

This article has a point to make, but the framing of the title is extremely misleading. The $5B figure is total revenue, and was framed as a not less than figure. The $19B figure was annualized revenue run rate. A figure that has grown rapidly month over month. These discrepancies are described clearly in the text of the article.

vb-84486• 2 months ago

His point looks still correct (the total revenue reported to the public is 34% higher than the one in the affidavit) but the title is definitely clickbait.

I guess the "5b vs 6.67b" pushes view counters less than "5b vs 19b" ...

barrkel• 2 months ago

Is this mostly a mixup between annualized revenue and booked revenue?

If so, this is a big pile of nothing.

Anyway, the article looked like it was written by Claude and after I read what were clearly references to two different things, I came back here.

Where's Ed: Anthropic Told Court $5B but Public $19B

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