Prof G Markets · Wednesday, September 30, 2026
The large net and operating losses reported by Anthropic are partly attributed to non-cash charges and training costs, leading to questions about the company's true financial health. Analyst Paul Kadrovski suggests Anthropic may be employing 'finance theater' by attempting to characterize significant costs as non-operating, a strategy he compares to 'community adjusted earnings'.
“It's hugely important. And this is the point where the, the, the, you know, finance has theater begins. Because what's going to happen is they are going to try and characterize this operating loss is as really related to something that we shouldn't be worrying ourselves too much about, which is to say training costs associated with the creation and running of these models.”
“So you have to decide, are these bad things, and they're not so bad? Because they're fundamental to the business? Are they things that they should be allowed to characterize as something other than operating costs, something you capitalize, for example, like you might with R&D, or are they actually just the day-to-day part of running the business? I would argue the latter.”
“But nevertheless, we're going to see a lot of EBT, earnings before bad things, coming up here.”