Anthropic's co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei at a developer conference in San Francisco on May 6.Don Feria/The Associated Press
Anthropic is closing in on its first quarterly operating profit, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters, as its sales eclipse the enormous costs to develop and deploy artificial intelligence.
In recent fundraising materials, the San Francisco-based startup apprised investors that its June quarter sales could reach at least US$10.9-billion, more than double its US$4.8-billion in revenue for the just-ended March quarter, the person said.
That will propel its second-quarter operating profit to an expected US$559-million, said the person, on condition of anonymity.
The Wall Street Journal reported the figures earlier on Wednesday.
OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic as it aims to dominate AI race
Anthropic’s financials underscore how demand for the lab’s Claude AI has jumped, as software developers use the technology to handle their computer programming and some enterprises deploy its top-shelf model Mythos to unearth vulnerabilities in their code.
The profit is rare for an AI industry that is grappling with the technology’s high costs.
One such expense, in the form of AI’s voracious demand for computing power, was also disclosed on Wednesday in the IPO filing of SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rival space and AI company.
SpaceX said Anthropic had agreed to pay it US$1.25-billion per month through May 2029, in deals for compute capacity that now include both of SpaceX’s AI training data centre clusters, Colossus and Colossus II.
Anthropic in talks to raise at least $30-billion in funds at $950-billion valuation
Either Anthropic or SpaceX can terminate the agreements with 90 days’ notice, and fees would be reduced during the capacity ramp-up this month and next, the filing said.
Musk posted on X that SpaceX was in discussions with other companies about “offering AI compute as a service at significant scale,” which would be a boost as its AI segment remains in the red.
SpaceX’s AI segment lost about US$2.5-billion from operations in the March quarter, on segment revenue of US$818-million, its IPO filing showed.