Anthropic's cost stack arrived on schedule

BURIED TEN PARAGRAPHS into the Wall Street Journal's Wednesday account of Anthropic's first profitable quarter was a number that, in any reading other than the one the headline writers produced, was the most consequential line in the piece. In the first quarter, the company spent 71 cents on computing power for every dollar of revenue. In the current quarter, it expects to spend 56.

The headline reading was, by midday, the one the markets had absorbed. Anthropic, the San Francisco AI lab founded by former OpenAI executives in 2021, will turn its first operating profit this quarter — $559 million in operating income on $10.9 billion in projected second-quarter revenue, more than double the $4.8 billion the company posted in the first three months of the year. Dario Amodei, Anthropic's chief executive, had joked at the company's developer conference earlier this month that the revenue growth had become "too hard to handle" and that he was hoping for "some more normal numbers." Wall Street, by Wednesday, was not hoping for anything of the kind.

The disclosure landed inside a window. Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX are racing toward public listings that, on current investor math, would value each above a trillion dollars. OpenAI may file IPO paperwork as soon as Friday, the Journal also reported on Wednesday. SpaceX's listing is expected as soon as June. For institutional investors writing the round's anchor checks, the four-to-six week window before the first prospectus arrives is the window in which financial postures harden into expectations. Anthropic disclosed its profitable quarter inside that window. The disclosure was timed.