Anthropic Told Investors It Made $16.8 Billion in Three Months and Is Profitable, If You Adjust. The Same Week, the First Breakout AI Chatbot Startup Went Bankrupt and Sold Itself to Disney for $20 Million
About This Episode
At a Wednesday investor meeting ahead of a November IPO that could value it at $2 trillion, Anthropic said third-quarter revenue rose 45% to $16.8 billion, that it is profitable on an adjusted basis, and that it earned $1.70 for every dollar it spent on compute. Two days earlier Character.AI, valued at $1 billion in 2023 and once the poster child for consumer AI, filed for Chapter 11 with a court affidavit showing it spent $10-14 million a month on compute against peak revenue of $5.3 million a month. Same technology, same year, opposite ends of the stack.
Our Take
Same week, same technology: the company at the top of the AI stack shows investors a quarter that lets it ask the public for $2 trillion, while the first famous consumer AI app shows a bankruptcy court that it never had a business, which raises the question of who gets to own the machine that automates minds and what being owned by shareholders does to it.
Continue Reading on Unscarcity
When AI Goes Public: Shareholders vs. Abundance
Direct match: the article tracks Anthropic's $2T listing and argues that public shareholders re-impose scarcity logic (margin, pricing power, growth) on the technology that is supposed to end scarcity; tonight's investor day is that logic arriving on schedule.
Value Migration: When the Input Goes Free, Where Does the Money Go?
Complementary: explains why a company that only resold intelligence (Character.AI) could not keep any margin while the layer that owns the model and the compute contract (Anthropic) books $1.70 per compute dollar; the money moved to the layers where scarcity survives.