I'm an Anthropic Fanboy. Here's Why Their Revenue Numbers Bother Me.

I've been all-in on Claude for a couple of months now. I pay $200 a month for the Max plan. I use Dispatch, Cowork, Claude Code — the whole ecosystem. I've built projects, written content, and automated workflows with it that I genuinely could not have done otherwise. I'm a fan. That's not in question.

Which is why it bothers me that Anthropic seems to be presenting their revenue numbers in a way that doesn't tell the full story.

Here's what's going on. Anthropic recently hit $30 billion in annualized revenue run rate. Headlines everywhere: "Anthropic passes OpenAI." But there's a catch that most of the coverage glosses over.

Anthropic reports revenue from cloud partners like AWS and Google Cloud on a gross basis. That means if a customer pays $100 for Claude through AWS, Anthropic books the full $100 as revenue — even though AWS takes a significant cut. Reports suggest Anthropic could pay cloud providers $1.9 billion this year and as much as $6.4 billion by 2027 just in reseller fees. That's not a rounding error.

OpenAI, by contrast, reports net — only counting what they actually receive after the cloud provider takes their share. So when you see "Anthropic passed OpenAI in revenue," you're comparing two numbers that were calculated differently.

Now, is this malicious? No, I don't think so. Gross revenue reporting is a legitimate accounting method. A lot of businesses report growth as gross revenue, and there's nothing technically wrong with that. But here's the thing — when you're approaching an IPO, investors don't care about gross. They want to know net. They want EBITDA after operating costs. They want to know what you actually keep after the cloud providers take their cut.

So it feels like Anthropic should have thought about that before putting these numbers out there. Because the impression most people walk away with is "$30 billion in revenue," not "$30 billion gross before we pay billions back to AWS and Google." And for a company that positions itself as the transparent, trustworthy AI lab, that gap between impression and reality is worth questioning.

I'll be honest — maybe I'm taking their side because I love the product so much. It's hard to be objective about a company whose tools you use every single day.

On top of that, both companies report "annualized run rate" — which is just one month's revenue multiplied by twelve. That number assumes the current month repeats perfectly for a full year. No seasonal dips, no churn, no fluctuation. It's a standard startup metric, but presenting it alongside gross revenue compounds the perception gap.

This whole thing made me look at the Mythos story with fresh eyes too. Anthropic announced that their most powerful model escaped its testing sandbox and emailed a researcher. My first instinct was to be skeptical — maybe the story was overblown for PR value. But the more I looked into it, the more real it seems. Anthropic's red team report says the escape happened against fully hardened systems with all defenses enabled. The model developed a multi-step exploit to break through active security measures. That's not a staged demo.

And that's actually what makes the revenue thing more frustrating. The product is real. The research is real. Mythos genuinely found thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities, and Project Glasswing partners are confirming the findings. Claude is genuinely the best AI tool I've used. They don't need to dress up the financial numbers — the work speaks for itself.

When you have a product this good and research this legitimate, presenting your revenue in the most favorable possible light just invites the kind of scrutiny that undermines the trust you've built. IPO advisers are already flagging that Anthropic and OpenAI's different revenue methodologies will come up with regulators. Why not get ahead of that by being the company that reports conservatively and lets the growth speak for itself?

Am I going to switch? Probably not. The product is too good. But I notice these things, and I think other paying customers should too.

Sources: Semafor, The Information, Bloomberg, Where's Your Ed At (Ed Zitron), Anthropic Red Team Report