On Thursday, AI company Anthropic told investors it is set to turn a profit in the second quarter of this year, according to the Financial Times.
The company said its revenue for Q2 will reach $10.9 billion, more than double the $4.8 billion it made in the first three months of the year, the paper reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
By its own calculation, this will propel the company to a profit of $559 million for the quarter. If this is accurate, it would be the first time a major AI company turned a profit, and would give the company an advantage over its rival OpenAI as both seek to file initial public offerings (IPO) in the coming months.
However, the company is not required to use traditional accounting methods to come to its revenue predictions, as it is still private. Its reliance on annualised revenue statistics, which project total revenues based on a one month income, has led some including author and critic Ed Zitron to question their veracity.
In his blog, Zitron noted that the company reported an annualised revenue of $14 billion in February, which averages to $1.17 billion a month, which appears to clash with its claim of an income of $4.8 billion in Q1. He added that it is possible the company is frontloading revenue to achieve this figure by, for example, taking prepayment of tokens from large companies.
On Thursday, rival AI developer SpaceX filed a prospectus with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in preparation for its own IPO, and reported its AI division had made a loss of $2.47 billion in the first quarter of this year.
