Monologue: Anthropic Lost $8bn In 2025, Was A Worse Business Than OpenAI

In 2025, Anthropic lost over $8 billion on $4.6 billion in revenue, spending $2.75 for every dollar it brought in. That made it a worse business than OpenAI, which spent $2.60 to make a dollar that same year—contradicting the widespread narrative that Anthropic was the leaner, more disciplined company that would reach profitability first. Host Ed Zitron walks through the numbers from Anthropic’s audited financials to explain why the conventional wisdom about which AI lab has better economics has been wrong, and why the company’s path forward looks bleak.

The numbers that broke the narrative

Anthropic’s 2025 operating expenses totaled $12.65 billion against $4.6 billion in revenue. Compute costs alone came to $7.33 billion. The company’s net loss was technically $42 billion, but that figure includes stock-related accounting from convertible notes—Zitron sets that aside as not a cash loss. What matters is the core operating picture: a company hemorrhaging cash on every dollar of sales.

For comparison, OpenAI spent $34 billion to make $13.07 billion in 2025, or $2.60 per dollar of revenue. Zitron notes that “so many people assured me that this is the company that worked it all out” when, in fact, “Dario Amodei’s horrid son was just as obese as Altman’s—a rotten, unprofitable pile of shit.” The gap is small, but the direction is telling: Anthropic was worse, not better.