Is any AI lab profitable? OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Mistral (2026)
Revenue, run-rate, compute commitments and losses at OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI (SpaceX), Mistral, Google DeepMind and Meta, each figure labelled as a company figure, a filing or a press report with its date. Why an 85% gross margin and an $80.7 billion net loss can sit in the same filing, and what model prices show.
Anthropic’s IPO filing shows an operating loss of $693 million for the first half of 2026, a net loss of $80.7 billion and an “adjusted” operating profit of $1.6 billion. Two days later, Semafor reported its “85% gross margin”. SpaceX says the AI segment that owns Grok made a $431 million operating profit last quarter. OpenAI’s annualised revenue has been reported at about $70 billion and at about $50 billion within ten days. All of these figures can be true at once, because each measures something different.
This piece collects every revenue, run-rate, compute and loss figure we could source for OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Mistral, plus what Alphabet and Meta disclose about Google DeepMind and Meta’s AI lab. Each figure is labelled by where it comes from. A company figure is something the company published or said on record. A filing figure comes from a regulatory filing, and we name the outlet we read it through, because we didn’t pull filings from the SEC ourselves. A press report names the outlet and says whether it relies on unnamed sources or leaked documents. Our own arithmetic and analysis are marked as ours. Everything is as of 29 October 2026.
The short answer
- No independent frontier lab has reported an operating profit under standard accounting (GAAP or IFRS) for any half-year. The closest is Anthropic. It had one profitable quarter, Q2 2026 with $974 million of operating income, but an operating loss of $693 million for the first half of 2026. It was profitable on an adjusted basis ($1.6 billion excluding stock pay) and generated $3.93 billion of operating cash flow (filing, via TechCrunch and Fortune, 26–27 October).
- SpaceX’s AI segment made an operating profit in Q3 2026: $431 million on $7.6 billion of revenue (company figure, 20 October). SpaceX credits the improvement mainly to higher-margin contracts renting compute to other companies, alongside Cursor and Grok growth. The segment still lost $3.3 billion over the first nine months and spent $16.4 billion on capital expenditure in the quarter.
- OpenAI is losing money fast, by every account. It publishes no financials. Press reports put its Q2 2026 operating loss at $12.3 billion on $6.7 billion of revenue (WSJ, citing people familiar with the results, 19 August). They also put its projected negative free cash flow at $278 billion over 2026–2030 (FT, from a company presentation, 18 September).
- Mistral publishes no profit or loss figures. Its CEO says it is on track for more than $1 billion of annual recurring revenue by the end of 2026.
- Google DeepMind and Meta’s AI lab have no P&L of their own. Their parents are very profitable. Alphabet’s shared AI research sits in a $7.7 billion cost line for Q3 2026 that has no revenue attached.
- The common thread: running models for paying customers is now profitable at Anthropic (an 85% gross margin, by our calculation from figures reported from the filing). Training the next model and reserving years of compute ahead is what turns the totals red.
How do the labs’ latest results compare?
The table puts each lab’s most recent reported period side by side. Revenue is recognised revenue for the period (not a run-rate). Operating income is after all operating costs, including training compute and stock-based pay; a minus sign is a loss.
| Lab | Period | Revenue ($B) | Operating income ($B) | Where the figure comes from |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anthropic | H1 2026 | 16.3 | -0.69 | Filing (S-1), via TechCrunch and The Register, 26 Oct 2026 |
| Anthropic | Q2 2026 | 11.6 | 0.97 | Filing (S-1), via Fortune and Bernama/Xinhua, 26–27 Oct 2026 |
| OpenAI | Q2 2026 | 6.7 | -12.3 | Press report: WSJ, citing people familiar with the results, 19 Aug 2026 |
| OpenAI | 2025 | 13.1 | -20.9 | Press report: leaked audited accounts, obtained by Ed Zitron and verified by the FT, Jun 2026 |
| SpaceX SI segment (xAI, X, Cursor) | Q3 2026 | 7.56 | 0.43 | Company figure: SpaceX Q3 release, 20 Oct 2026 |
| SpaceX SI segment (xAI, X, Cursor) | Jan–Sep 2026 | 10.94 | -3.30 | Company figure: same release |
H1 means January to June. SI is SpaceX’s “Super Intelligence” segment, which holds the Grok models, the Colossus data centres, the X social network and, since 14 August, Cursor. Mistral, Google DeepMind and Meta Superintelligence Labs aren’t in the table because none of them publishes revenue and operating income of its own. Listed Chinese labs report under IFRS and lose money too: MiniMax, for example, reported a $293 million adjusted (non-IFRS, unaudited) net loss on $116.6 million of revenue for the first half of 2026 (company figure).
The rows aren’t fully like for like. Anthropic counts sales through cloud marketplaces at their gross value, OpenAI counts only its net share of some partner sales (see gross versus net), and SpaceX’s segment includes an ad-funded social network.
Is Anthropic profitable?
Anthropic is profitable on an adjusted basis and on cash flow, but not under GAAP for any half-year so far. Its S-1, filed on 26 October for a Nasdaq listing as ANT, is the most detailed set of numbers any frontier lab has published. We read it through press coverage (our 26 October daily has the governance details); the figures below are labelled with the outlets that reported them.
What the S-1 shows for the first half of 2026
Revenue was $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, up from $1.2 billion a year earlier, with an operating loss of $693 million against $2.1 billion a year earlier (TechCrunch, The Register, 26 October). Q2 alone brought $11.6 billion of revenue and the company’s first operating profit, $974 million (Bernama/Xinhua, 27 October). By our arithmetic, Q1 therefore lost about $1.7 billion.
The $80.7 billion net loss is mostly not money spent. The Register reports that $72.4 billion of it is an accounting adjustment tied to the company’s rising valuation. The convertible notes and similar instruments investors hold are marked at fair value, so a higher valuation shows up as a loss. TechCrunch quotes the filing’s warning that the company “may not achieve or sustain profitability in the future.”
On Anthropic’s own adjusted measure, which adds back stock-based compensation and some other non-cash items, the first half made $1.62 billion of operating income, a 10% margin (Fortune, 27 October). Fortune also reports $3.93 billion of cash from operations against just $482 million of capital spending, so free cash flow was about $3.45 billion, and $131.7 billion of cash and short-term investments at 30 June after the $65 billion Series H.
Why an 85% gross margin doesn’t mean an 85% profit
The S-1 puts H1 2026 cost of revenue at about $2.4 billion against $16.3 billion of revenue (Fortune, 26 October). That gives the 85% gross margin Semafor highlighted on 28 October, on “the core work of running its existing AI models”. Semafor adds that “its margin excludes the cost of training new models”. Bloomberg, citing people familiar with an investor presentation, reported the same 85% for the third quarter.
Training and research sit in research and development, which came to $9.74 billion in the first half, 60% of revenue (R&D World, from the S-1’s notes). Total compute and infrastructure spending was nearly $9 billion (Bernama). Less than a third of that was counted as the cost of serving customers. The rest went on training, research and internal use. Fees that Amazon, Google and Microsoft keep for reselling Claude on their clouds aren’t in cost of revenue either. Reuters, reading the draft S-1, reported that Anthropic books them as a marketing and partnerships expense.
Anthropic’s own efficiency metric, revenue per dollar of all compute including training, reached 2.08 in Q2 2026, up from 0.69 in Q4 2025 (Fortune).
What Anthropic told investors about the third quarter
The S-1 leaves Q3 blank. Press reports from Anthropic’s investor presentation on 14 October give $16.8 billion of Q3 revenue and an 11% adjusted operating margin excluding stock-based compensation. The FT, Bloomberg and Reuters all reported the revenue, and the FT and Bloomberg the margin (our 14 October daily). The FT also reported $1.70 of revenue per dollar of compute. That is down from Q2’s 2.08 as new capacity came online, which is a press figure set against a filing figure, so treat the comparison as indicative.
Two things weigh on future GAAP profit. The first is stock-based pay, which the adjusted figures leave out. The second is compute contracts, covered below.
Is OpenAI profitable?
No. OpenAI is private and has published no audited financials, but every account of its numbers shows large and growing operating losses. The figures below come from press reports of leaked or investor documents, except where OpenAI itself is quoted.
Revenue: $2 billion a month in March, about $50 billion annualised by September
OpenAI’s latest public revenue statement is from 31 March 2026, when it closed $122 billion of funding at an $852 billion valuation. It said “We are now generating $2B in revenue per month” (company figure, OpenAI; openai.com blocks our fetcher, so we confirmed the quote through Constellation Research).
Recognised revenue was $5.7 billion in Q1 2026 (The Information via The Next Web, 17 June) and $6.7 billion in Q2 (WSJ via Yahoo Finance, 19 August). Both are press reports. Full-year 2025 revenue was $13.1 billion, according to leaked 2025 accounts (below); TechCrunch puts it at “about $13 billion”.
On annualised revenue, two figures circulated within ten days:
- About $70 billion. Axios, then Reuters citing one unnamed source, reported on 29 September that annualised revenue was “approaching $70 billion” (Reuters via SRN).
- About $50 billion. The FT, citing financial documents, reported on 8 October that annualised revenue was about $50 billion as of September. It said the $70 billion came from investors’ attempts to compare OpenAI’s figure with Anthropic’s (Investing.com summary, TechCrunch).
- Bloomberg’s account. Bloomberg, citing people familiar, reported the same “roughly $50 billion” for the end of September and an expectation of $70 billion or more by the end of the year (via Yahoo Finance). OpenAI declined to comment.
Our read: $50 billion is the September figure on OpenAI’s own basis, and $70 billion a gross-up or a year-end target. A company presentation reported by the FT put 2026 revenue at $36 billion.
Losses and cash burn
Reports put OpenAI’s losses at these levels:
- 2025: an operating loss of $20.9 billion and a net loss of $38.5 billion, the net figure inflated by a $41.6 billion non-cash charge tied to the for-profit conversion. Source: audited accounts obtained by Ed Zitron and independently verified by the FT, as reported by Quartz on 16 June.
- Q1 2026: cash burn of $3.7 billion and more than $73 billion of cash at the end of March (The Information, via The Next Web).
- Q1 and Q2 2026: operating losses including stock pay of $9.3 billion and $12.3 billion (WSJ). By our arithmetic, that is about $21.6 billion of operating losses on $12.4 billion of revenue in the first half.
- 2026–2030: negative free cash flow of $278 billion, improved from about $305 billion in a May projection. This comes from a July company presentation reported by the FT and relayed by Reuters on 18 September, which says OpenAI is on pace to use up its March raise by 2028. The comparison with May is from The Next Web’s account of the same FT report.
What Microsoft’s filings say about OpenAI
Microsoft’s filings are the most direct regulator-filed numbers on OpenAI. Its 10-Q for the quarter to 30 September shows $10 billion of revenue from “commercial arrangements with OpenAI, including revenue-sharing payments”, nearly 11% of Microsoft’s $92.3 billion revenue. It also shows $7.2 billion owed by OpenAI, up from $6 billion in June (TechCrunch, 28 October). Microsoft doesn’t split that between Azure compute and revenue share.
Our analysis: $10 billion a quarter going to one supplier is close to OpenAI’s own quarterly revenue at a $40–50 billion annualised pace. Without Microsoft’s split, we can’t tell how much of it is compute OpenAI bought and how much is revenue share.
Is xAI profitable?
xAI no longer reports alone. SpaceX bought it in February 2026 and listed on Nasdaq in June, so Grok’s results sit inside SpaceX’s SI segment, and in Q3 2026 that segment made its first quarterly operating profit in the periods SpaceX has disclosed. The Q3 release, a company figure from 20 October (our daily), gives:
- Revenue: $7.56 billion, up 830% on a year earlier. Of that, $7.02 billion was “SI solutions & infrastructure” and $538 million was X advertising. Cursor contributed $608 million after closing on 14 August.
- Operating income: $431 million, after losses of $1.26 billion in Q2 and $2.47 billion in Q1. Over nine months the segment lost $3.30 billion.
- Non-cash costs: depreciation of $2.47 billion and stock-based compensation of $2.04 billion, of which $1.22 billion is tied to the Cursor deal.
- Capital spending: $16.4 billion in the quarter and $40.0 billion over nine months, against 1.7 GW of compute capacity.
SpaceX explains the jump in its own words: revenue was “primarily driven by the activation of new cloud services agreements, the acquisition of Cursor, and increased Grok adoption”. On the earnings call, as transcribed by the Motley Fool, the CFO said the segment’s adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) was “driven primarily by higher-margin cloud service agreements”. Our reading: most of the improvement came from renting out compute, although operating income is after $2.47 billion of depreciation and the Cursor stock pay, and Elon Musk said on the call that the goal is to split compute roughly evenly between SpaceX’s own use and rental. The tenants include Anthropic, whose S-1 provides for up to $120.5 billion of SpaceX compute through 2029 (filing, via Fortune). They also include Google, which agreed to pay $920 million a month from October (Bloomberg, via Yahoo Finance, June). One lab’s compute bill is another company’s profit.
Before the merger, xAI lost heavily. SpaceX’s own S-1, as reported by TechCrunch on 20 May, showed an operating loss of $6.4 billion on $3.2 billion of revenue in 2025, figures that include X. Our analysis: capex running at twice the segment’s revenue means the Q3 profit depends on those rental contracts continuing. Anthropic’s S-1 lets either side cancel on 90 days’ notice once the initial non-cancellable periods end in early 2027 (filing, via Gizmodo), and Google’s deal also has a 90-day exit (Bloomberg).
Is Mistral profitable?
Mistral doesn’t say. It is private and has published no profit or loss figure (we checked Mistral’s newsroom, its funding announcements and press coverage on 29 October 2026). What it has said is about revenue:
- February 2026: CEO Arthur Mensch told the FT that the annualised run-rate was over $400 million, up from $20 million a year earlier (as summarised by The Decoder, 11 February).
- September 2026: Mensch told CNBC that Mistral is on track to pass $1 billion in annual recurring revenue before the end of the year (as reported by Quartz via Yahoo Finance, 8 September).
Mistral is spending on its own compute. It raised a €3 billion Series D at a valuation above €21 billion in September, took on $830 million of debt in March for 13,800 Nvidia chips (The Next Web), and plans “up to 1 GW of capacity by 2030” (company figures).
What do Google and Meta disclose about DeepMind and their AI labs?
Neither Alphabet nor Meta reports a profit or loss for its AI lab. Both parents are highly profitable. Their AI spending is visible only as costs and capital spending.
Alphabet and Google DeepMind
Alphabet’s Q3 2026 release (company figure, 28 October) shows $127.6 billion of revenue and $40.6 billion of operating income. Google Cloud brought in $30.7 billion of revenue, up 103%, with $11.1 billion of operating income. Capital spending was $51.4 billion in the quarter, and free cash flow was negative $9.1 billion. On the earnings call the CFO kept full-year 2026 capex guidance at $195–205 billion and said it would “increase significantly in 2027”.
DeepMind shows up in a line called “Alphabet-level activities”, an operating loss of $7.66 billion in Q3, up from $4.47 billion a year earlier. Alphabet says it “primarily reflect[s] expenses related to our shared AI research and development”. It mixes model-development compute and staff with corporate costs such as philanthropy and some legal costs, and it has no revenue attached. Gemini’s revenue is spread across Search, subscriptions and Cloud. The only AI revenue figure on the call was “tens of billions of dollars in AI revenues year-to-date” in Google Cloud.
Meta and Meta Superintelligence Labs
Meta’s Q3 2026 release (company figure, 21 October) reports only two segments, Family of Apps and Reality Labs. It shows $64.6 billion of revenue, $34.9 billion of capital spending including finance leases, and 2026 capex guidance of $135–145 billion. There is no line for Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Meta says its “MSL investments … will take longer to generate returns than those in our core business”.
On the call, Mark Zuckerberg put the industry’s economics plainly: “since training is a large fixed cost, now that we have leading models, we want to serve as much high-margin inference demand as possible.” To help pay for the build-out, Meta priced about $37.5 billion of common and preferred stock on 26 October (pricing release; the total is our arithmetic, and the common stock is sold through forward sales that pay out when they settle).
What is the difference between run-rate and recognised revenue?
Recognised revenue is what a company earned in a past period under accounting rules. Run-rate (or annualised) revenue projects a recent month or quarter forward to a full year; it isn’t an accounting measure, and each company picks its own method.
The gap can be large in a fast-growing company. Anthropic said its run-rate “crossed $47 billion” in May (company figure, Series H announcement), yet its recognised revenue for the whole of January to June was $16.3 billion. Its recognised 2025 revenue was about $4.6 billion (filing, via Bernama), while its run-rate at the end of 2025 was reported at about $9 billion (Reuters; Bloomberg in January).
Reuters Breakingviews, citing a person familiar, described Anthropic’s method as the last 28 days of usage-based sales multiplied by 13, plus monthly subscription revenue multiplied by 12 (quoted by Simon Willison). Alphabet uses the term too. Sundar Pichai’s “half-trillion dollar revenue run rate” is roughly Q3 revenue multiplied by four (our arithmetic).
A run-rate tells you how fast revenue is growing right now. It doesn’t tell you what the company earned, and it says nothing about profit.
Why are Anthropic and OpenAI revenue numbers not comparable?
They count cloud-partner sales differently.
- Anthropic books gross. When a customer buys Claude through Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex AI or Microsoft Foundry, Anthropic counts the full sale as revenue, because it considers itself the principal. The cloud’s cut is booked as an expense. Reuters, reading the draft S-1, put 2025 marketplace sales at $2.16 billion, 47% of revenue, with fees of about 16 cents per dollar.
- OpenAI books net. For some sales through partners such as Microsoft, OpenAI counts only its share. Bloomberg described this on 9 October as “not apples to apples”. We read Bloomberg’s piece only through a summary. The FT described the same difference independently.
US accounting rules allow both treatments, depending on who controls the service, sets the price and carries the risk (ASC 606 principal-versus-agent guidance). Our analysis: with marketplaces at 47% of 2025 revenue and fees of about 16 cents per dollar (both Reuters), booking net would have trimmed Anthropic’s 2025 revenue by under 8%, not halved it. The method matters most when you rank the two labs against each other.
Why do labs report high gross margins and still lose money?
Gross margin covers only the cost of serving today’s customers, not training the next model, paying researchers or reserving compute years ahead. Anthropic’s first half shows the pattern:
- Gross margin: 85%, because serving cost about $2.4 billion against $16.3 billion of revenue.
- Research and development: $9.74 billion, including most of the compute.
- Sales, marketing and partnerships (which includes partner fees): $3.8 billion, and general and administrative costs another $1.05 billion. These two lines are from S-1 tables quoted by the analyst firm Cestrian; with revenue, cost of revenue and R&D they reconcile exactly to the -$693 million operating loss (our check).
Dario Amodei described the mechanism in 2025. Each model, treated as its own business, can earn back its cost. The company still loses money because the next model costs far more to train. Epoch AI’s estimate for GPT-5 (January 2026) found a gross margin of about 30%, but more spent on R&D in the four months before launch than the model earned in gross profit while it was the flagship. That is the opposite of Amodei’s per-model claim, at least for that model, though Epoch still concludes profitability is possible.
For current models the evidence is Anthropic’s filing. Training and research compute was larger than serving compute in the first half of 2026, and the company still came close to breaking even. That is new, and it is why the S-1 matters beyond Anthropic.
How much compute have the labs committed to?
Hundreds of billions of dollars each, which is why “profitable this quarter” doesn’t settle the question. The totals measure different things, so read the third column before comparing.
| Lab | Amount ($B) | What it measures | Where the figure comes from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anthropic | 657 | Infrastructure contracts named in the S-1 (the S-1 gives no total) | Filing, Fortune’s tally, 27 Oct 2026 |
| Anthropic | 498 | The non-cancellable part of those contracts | Filing, Fortune’s tally, 27 Oct 2026 |
| OpenAI | 665 | Purchase commitments at 31 Mar 2026, mostly compute | Press report: The Information (financial statements), via The Next Web, 22 Jun 2026 |
| OpenAI | 856 | Planned compute and infrastructure spending, 2026–2030 | Press report: FT (company presentation), 18 Sep 2026 |
| OpenAI | 1,400 | About 30 GW of compute commitments | Company figure: Sam Altman, via Reuters, 28 Oct 2025 |
“Non-cancellable” means Anthropic pays whether or not it uses the capacity. OpenAI’s three figures come from different dates and definitions, and outlets have reported them as moving between about $600 billion and $1.4 trillion over the past year.
The named counterparties include SpaceX (up to $120.5 billion through 2029, via Fortune), Google and Amazon, each at more than $100 billion (filing, via Bernama/Xinhua). Reported totals for Anthropic’s commitments range from about $500 billion to $750 billion or more, because outlets add up different layers of the same contracts. That is why we quote Fortune’s contract-by-contract tally. For scale, as our analysis: the $498 billion non-cancellable figure is about 30 times Anthropic’s first-half revenue and nearly four times its cash.
SpaceX, Alphabet and Meta build much of their own capacity, so their spending shows up as capital expenditure instead: money already spent, not a forward commitment. It was $40 billion for SpaceX’s AI segment over nine months, $132 billion for all of Alphabet over the same period, and a guided $135–145 billion for all of Meta’s year (company figures). Those are whole-company totals for Alphabet and Meta: Alphabet’s includes Cloud capacity sold to outside customers, and Meta also rents third-party cloud capacity.
What do model prices tell us about AI lab margins?
Direct list prices at the top end haven’t fallen this autumn, and some are rising. On our model price tracker, checked against each lab’s pricing page on 29 October 2026, the current flagship and mid-tier models sit at a handful of shared price points:
| Model | Lab | Input ($ per 1M tokens) | Output ($ per 1M tokens) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Fable 5.1 | Anthropic | 10 | 50 |
| GPT-6 Astra | OpenAI | 10 | 50 |
| Claude Opus 5.5 | Anthropic | 4 | 20 |
| Muse Wonder (preview) | Meta | 4 | 20 |
| Gemini 4 Argon | 2 | 10 | |
| GPT-6.1 Sol | OpenAI | 2 | 10 |
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | Anthropic | 2 | 10 |
| Grok 4.7 | xAI (SpaceX) | 2 | 6 |
| Mistral Large 4 (preview) | Mistral | 1.36 | 4.18 |
| GPT-6.1 Terra | OpenAI | 1 | 5 |
| Claude Haiku 5.5 | Anthropic | 0.10 | 0.50 |
| GPT-6 Luna | OpenAI | 0.10 | 0.50 |
Prices are list prices for standard-context requests direct from each lab, before caching and batch discounts; long prompts cost more on several models (over 100,000 tokens on Claude Haiku 5.5, 200,000 on Grok 4.7 and 272,000 on OpenAI’s models). Gemini 4 Argon’s price is introductory and rises to $4/$20 on 1 December.
The tracker’s price changes show where the pressure is:
- Introductory prices are scheduled to double. Google’s Gemini 4 Argon goes from $2/$10 to $4/$20 on 1 December, the same as Claude Opus 5.5 (our 13 October daily). Gemini 3.8 Flash goes from $0.75/$3.75 to $1.50/$7.50 on 1 January.
- Mistral’s discount has ended. Mistral Large 4’s launch discount ended in October, taking it from $0.68/$2.09 back to $1.36/$4.18.
- The cuts are at the cheap end. Claude Haiku 5.5 launched at a tenth of Haiku 4.5’s price (7 October daily), matching GPT-6 Luna, and cache-read prices fell.
- The labs compete on capability, not price. At the middle, $2/$10 has become the shared price for a strong model, and labs ship better models at that price point.
Our analysis: list prices can’t give a lab’s margin, because we don’t see its serving costs, discounts or how much traffic each model gets. But the pattern fits the filings. Labs that report healthy gross margins aren’t cutting their top-tier prices, and Google’s introductory prices are scheduled to end. The real price pressure comes from open-weight models served by third parties. Vercel’s AI Gateway says those carried 71.5% of its tokens in September but only 23% of spend (15 October daily). For builders, a price war on flagship models doesn’t look imminent. Expect cheap tiers and cache discounts to keep improving faster than the top end.
How should you read the next AI lab revenue headline?
Ask five questions of any number before comparing it with another:
- Is it recognised revenue for a past period or a run-rate? If it says “annualised”, “run-rate” or “ARR”, it projects one month or quarter forward.
- Gross or net? Anthropic counts cloud-marketplace sales gross; OpenAI counts some partner sales net. Rankings between the two shift with the method.
- GAAP or adjusted? “Adjusted” usually excludes stock-based compensation, which is large at every lab and about to jump at Anthropic when it lists.
- Before or after training? A gross margin excludes training. Operating income includes it. Net income adds non-cash swings from valuation changes, which can run to tens of billions in either direction.
- Who says so? A filing has auditors and legal liability behind it. A company statement doesn’t. A press report of leaked documents can be accurate, but it is one step removed and often a snapshot of a projection.
By those tests, as of 29 October 2026, only SpaceX’s AI segment (Q3 2026) and Anthropic (Q2 2026) have reported a GAAP operating profit in their latest reported quarter, and neither is profitable over 2026 so far. SpaceX credits the improvement mainly to renting out compute. Anthropic’s came from selling its own models.
This is reporting and analysis, not investment advice; dbggr doesn’t recommend buying or selling any security. Figures are as reported on the dates given and many will be revised, especially when Anthropic amends its S-1 and OpenAI files its own. Dbggr isn’t affiliated with any company named here.
FAQ
Is OpenAI profitable?
No. OpenAI publishes no financials, but press reports put its operating loss at $12.3 billion in Q2 2026 on $6.7 billion of revenue (WSJ, citing people familiar with the results) and at $20.9 billion in 2025 (leaked audited accounts). The FT reported in September that a company presentation projects $278 billion of negative free cash flow from 2026 to 2030.
Is Anthropic profitable?
Anthropic made a GAAP operating profit in one quarter, Q2 2026 ($974 million), but lost $693 million over the first half of 2026, according to its S-1. On its adjusted measure, which excludes stock-based pay, it made $1.62 billion in the half, and operating cash flow was $3.93 billion. The $80.7 billion net loss is mostly a non-cash charge from revaluing convertible instruments.
Is xAI profitable?
xAI is now part of SpaceX, whose Super Intelligence segment (Grok, X, Cursor and the Colossus data centres) made a $431 million operating profit in Q3 2026 on $7.56 billion of revenue. SpaceX credits mainly its contracts renting compute to other companies, alongside Cursor and Grok growth. The segment still lost $3.3 billion over the first nine months of 2026.
What does run-rate revenue mean?
Run-rate revenue projects a recent period’s sales forward to a year, for example one month multiplied by 12. It isn’t an accounting measure and doesn’t show profit. Anthropic’s run-rate crossed $47 billion in May 2026, while its recognised revenue for January to June was $16.3 billion.
Why does Anthropic have an 85% gross margin but still lose money?
The 85% figure counts only the cost of serving customers, about $2.4 billion against $16.3 billion of first-half revenue. Training new models and research cost $9.74 billion in the same half, sitting in R&D, and sales, partner fees and general costs added about $4.9 billion more.
Does Google DeepMind make money?
Alphabet doesn’t say. It reports no DeepMind revenue or profit. Shared AI research costs sit in “Alphabet-level activities”, an operating loss of $7.66 billion in Q3 2026. Gemini revenue is spread across Search, subscriptions and Google Cloud, which earned $11.1 billion of operating income in the quarter.
