Anthropic’s key number is its 85% gross margin

As The Information wrote, it’s “a reality check” for skeptics who thought the consumption-based, pay-as-you-go pricing wouldn’t be profitable. Investors and journalists have now spent two days parsing Anthropic’s IPO filing — its risk factors, its $80 billion headline net loss, and its unusual governance structure — but there’s one number Silicon Valley prizes above all. The company reported an 85% gross profit margin on the core work of running its existing AI models — as The Information wrote, it’s “a reality check” for skeptics who thought the consumption-based, pay-as-you-go pricing wouldn’t be profitable. It could also be a good sign for Anthropic’s rival, OpenAI, which runs a similar business model, even though it’s considered less efficient in part because of its massive non-paying user base. Anthropic is still losing a lot of money overall, and its margin excludes the cost of training new models. But the number on its core product puts it in the same camp as Meta’s ad machine, which runs at roughly 81-82% gross margin, and above analysts’ estimates for Google Search ads (75—80%) and the iPhone (mid-40s).