Anthropic's Gross Margin Hits 85%

Semafor looked through Anthropic's S-1 filing, the document companies file before an IPO. The outlet found that Anthropic, the maker of Claude, earns an 85% gross margin on its current model deployments. That beats Meta's ad business, estimated at roughly 81 to 82%. It also beats Google's search ad business, estimated at 75 to 80%. It even beats the iPhone, where gross margin is estimated in the mid-40s. And yet over this same period, Anthropic posted a net loss of $80 billion.

This tells us something. The current pay-as-you-go pricing model for Claude pays for itself. It does not need investor subsidies to work. That $80 billion loss looks like a bet on training future models and building infrastructure, not a sign that the product itself loses money. So when token prices shift up or down, that is probably competitive pressure from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. It is not some deep flaw in Anthropic's business model.