The main question is now much of that ~USD 80bn of other expenses should be really be included in 2026 operating costs. It cuts to whether frontier inference is actually cashflow profitable.
If you take equity from Amazon and Google whereby the terms of that investments requires you to "spend" the investment in those investor's respective clouds, it's potentially a rather neat way of obfuscating your real level of profitability. Perhaps Anthropic only spent that equity on training rather than inference runs.
This is the circular financing that has been discussed widely in the press. It makes it very difficult for an outsider to really understanding whether the firm and by extension the other frontier labs are profitable.
If you take equity from Amazon and Google whereby the terms of that investments requires you to "spend" the investment in those investor's respective clouds, it's potentially a rather neat way of obfuscating your real level of profitability. Perhaps Anthropic only spent that equity on training rather than inference runs.
This is the circular financing that has been discussed widely in the press. It makes it very difficult for an outsider to really understanding whether the firm and by extension the other frontier labs are profitable.