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Comment by vb-8448 | Hacker News Reader

"Exceeds $5b" is a weird way to say "5$b +34%" ...

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a big fan of Zitron, but the narrative around revenues and profitability around AI labs are quite misleading.

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If you look at the table, the implied revenue for March 2026 was $1.58b. So isn't this just a case of the $5b number being from one month earlier than the $6.66b number? Ed dismisses this, but it seems to be the obvious answer - the CFO quote is from March 9, 2026, so 70% of the March 2026 revenue presumably had not yet been earnt. If you subtract that out (or even the whole month, which would also make sense), it checks out: you get something between $5.08b and $5.54b, reasonably describable as "exceeding $5b".

The $19b ARR is from March 3rd, so it is based on the revenue from February.

Ah, OK. It still seems reasonable they might report the number in the court affadavit with one month lag for various reasons. The root cause in the discrepancy is just that Anthropic claims to be (and appears to be) on a ridiculous tear, with +35% MoM growth. OP and Ed both seem to dismiss this as impossible, but it seems to align with Anthropic's recent desperate search for more capacity.

> they might report the number in the court affadavit with one month lag for various reasons

According to the article the total revenue figure in the affidavit is “to date”, so basically 8th or March.

I expect that no figure ever tended to the courts this way is actually correct literally to the date of filing. It's whatever numbers were in the most recent accounts when it was signed off.

Here[0] the original affidavit, IANAL but I'm pretty sure "up to date" in this context means "8th of March".

[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.46...

If the last number you saw was ~$5b as of last month, claiming revenue "exceeding $5 billion to date" doesn't seem unreasonable - it's still true.

Could've possibly made a stronger claim, but the affidavit may have been drafted/written before February's numbers were determined, even if those numbers were in by the time it'd been reviewed by their legal team and submitted.

Zitron’s narrative around AI revenues is that somehow the people Anthropic/OpenAI etc are pitching to, people who meet the sophisticated or wholesale investor tests (i.e., the only people actually able to trade on this information) do not know what ARR means, how it’s different from revenue, and are unable to read financial statements for themselves. And that he is seemingly the only one with insight, with the partial bits of information he has access to, that can tell them the truth of the situation.

I used to love his stuff. Until he just wouldn’t stop beating this drum so breathlessly. Now I wonder how much I’d suffered Gell-Man amnesia with the other content of his I’d previously enjoyed.

To be honest I'm pretty sure he is right about "AI players are basically throwing out numbers because the real one are not so shiny (yet?)".

What I'm not really fan about is the communication style and the "trust me bro" approach, which is pretty annoying ... but I guess it's because it's easier to make the view counter go up.

> somehow the people Anthropic/OpenAI etc are pitching to, people who meet the sophisticated or wholesale investor tests (i.e., the only people actually able to trade on this information) do not know what ARR means

This is… not unrealistic. Plenty of such investors have fallen for clear scams.

I mean, yes, "sophisticated" people, including institutional investors, do fall for scams. See SBF, Theranos. These scams are often most effective when there's mania and FOMO about a technology that everyone seems to be saying is amazing and will make them rich, in spite of the current evidence, which sounds a lot like AI.

If I were on the stand and therefore liable for perjury, I'd also try to give safe answers with some buffer.

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