OpenAI's New Deal

Anthropic has reached $30 billion in annualized revenue, a 3x increase since the end of last year and up 58% since the end of February. The number was tucked into a blog post about a massive new compute partnership with Google and Broadcom, but it suggests Anthropic may have flipped OpenAI in annualized run rate—though the two companies don't calculate things exactly the same way, and the host expects OpenAI to push back if they haven't actually been overtaken. The financials come as both companies face much greater scrutiny ahead of their expected IPOs later this year or early next.

The Financial Picture: Training Costs, Profitability, and the IPO Narrative

The Wall Street Journal published a deep dive into OpenAI and Anthropic's numbers, sourced from financial disclosures around each company's recent fundraising. The key focus was training costs, which are sky-high for both. OpenAI expects to spend around $30 billion on model training this year, triple what they spent last year. Anthropic's projected training costs are relatively more modest but still almost triple to reach $28 billion by 2028. Because training costs are so high, both companies are providing an alternate accounting of profitability that excludes them. Without training costs, both OpenAI and Anthropic are on track to eke out a small profit this year, with that profit accelerating movi