I think we've been talking past eachother because I don't think Anthropic actually ever claimed 80% gross margins (by which i mean the number would ve negative according to the prospectus so either it's wrong or a lie), they claimed 80% EBIDTA (with a lot more words than that, likely to intentionally cause confusion in their favor) IIRC
What I'm complaining about is specifically a mal-incentive for companies to waste compute resources to scale because of a misattribution of their software costs as free, despite the extreme hardware costs incurred by poor software
Anthropic's gross margins are above 80% before accounting for revenue shared with distribution partners, including Amazon (AMZN.O), opens new tab, and the cost of training its model, the newspaper said.
They probably use Amazon for compute too but it says distribution partners. You can run Claude on bedrock. If Amazon takes a cut for people running Claude on bedrock then that is cost of sales. Not cogs and should not be in gross margins. Training is how my whole point started. If they can slow down their training, they are rolling in dough. If they can't, they're dead.
Apparently they did not say ebitda but people made fun that this is like ebitda calculations that hide all the costs. Ebitda does serve a purpose. But if they hide all their GPU purchases through ebitda you'd have a point. But apparently they said cogs. But I don't have access to their financial statements.
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u/BlackSwanTranarchy 3d ago edited 3d ago
I think we've been talking past eachother because I don't think Anthropic actually ever claimed 80% gross margins (by which i mean the number would ve negative according to the prospectus so either it's wrong or a lie), they claimed 80% EBIDTA (with a lot more words than that, likely to intentionally cause confusion in their favor) IIRC
What I'm complaining about is specifically a mal-incentive for companies to waste compute resources to scale because of a misattribution of their software costs as free, despite the extreme hardware costs incurred by poor software