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Hello and welcome to a very special Better Offline monologue.

I'm your host, Ed Zittron.

On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about how Anthropic is about to have its first profitable quarter, specifically an operating profit, or a bit der profitability, so earnings before interest, tax and bad stuff, really, saying that Anthropics revenue revenue was said to more than double to $10.9 billion

in the second quarter of 2026, which is when said profit would happen.

Per the journal, Anthropic generated $4.8 billion in sales in the first quarter, and in Q2,

that's that $559 million of rating profits home.

Interesting. There's a lot of certainty, considering we're barely through the first half of the second quarter, and quite a specific number given the fact

that June hasn't started. And all of these numbers are mysteriously leaking exactly while

Anthropic is raising its funding round.

Oh, and there's another important note from the story, too.

The journal adds at the very bottom of the article that it, and I quote, is unclear what

accounting methods Anthropic has used to book revenue and costs, as the company isn't

yet required to follow the financial reporting requirements of a public company.

That's right.

Anthropic is possibly going to be a bit deprofitable for a single quarter on a non-gap, so generally is accepted accounting principles basis.

Anyway, I wonder how they did it.

Because based on the unhelpfully labeled diagram from the journal's article, it appears, as I said

last year, that Anthropics cost scale linearly with its revenues, except they magically didn't in the second

quarter. How? And I wonder if Anthropic will somehow stay profitable. Let's see if the

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