If Silicon Valley is a casino, OpenAI is the guy at the high-roller table betting the house while Anthropic is quietly counting cards. Company financials shared with investors show that AI startup Anthropic anticipates breaking even by 2028 while competitor OpenAI projects $74 billion in losses that same year. Anthropic (whose CEO left OpenAI four years ago after a feud with Sam Altman) runs more like your typical software company: 80% of revenue from enterprise clients, steady monetization, no compute-draining side quests like video or image generation. Its Claude models have also become favored among coders. OpenAI, meanwhile, spends like a sovereign wealth fund trying to will AGI into existence: thinner margins, massive R&D burn, $1.4 trillion in future infrastructure commitments (and counting). As bubble concerns percolate, Anthropic’s boring-but-disciplined approach may start to look promising — though at a $500B valuation, OpenAI has no shortage of investor demand for its aggressive approach. Which strategy takes the lead will hinge partly on where we end up in the capital cycle. When money is cheap, startups spend big to scale fast. When liquidity tightens, markets reward margins. If Anthropic (recently valued at $183B) plays catch-up to OpenAI, it may signal a shift from the “build-at-all-costs” phase to the “show-me-the-margins” phase of the AI trade.
