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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2562 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 13, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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They do, but the race is less about debt and more about the capability growth and its effects on revenue. OAI and Anthropic are both printing money. But the 50-100B a year they can theoretically print will vanish in a single year if a competitor leapfrogs them. Their revenue is only sustainable while they remain the only game in town, if open or big tech model competitors like gemini get capability parity, they go from serving inference at 80% margins to serving inference at 2% margins as competition intensifies (At least on API usage billing, consumers are probably more locked in, but still very willing to move on if someone else has a better model for their 20 dollars). Their debt is nothing if they keep leading the pack, everything if others catch up to their leads.

So they can't service their debt if they stop and they can't finance continuing (much longer) either?

They can't service their debt if their revenue falls off a cliff. Anthropic's debt is in the vicinity of 70 billion. Their revenue this year is projected to be a whopping 65 billion (If each quarter is as good as their last one). Their revenue last year was just under 10 billion. See the issue? Those are some very different numbers. OpenAI's debt is probably in the vicinity of 100 billion, but their revenue this year is on track to hit 40 billion. I don't know their rates, but the issue is those revenue numbers could theoretically as easily go to tens of billions as they could hundreds of millions, and those are revenue numbers, not profit. If the industry ends up with mostly comparable models, a race to the bottom on cost could destroy companies. But if the big names manage to hold their decisive advantage for as little as five years, they could well print over a trillion dollars before anyone catches up and begins to drive price down.

But to answer your question, they can service their debt unless revenue falls below well last year's numbers and remains that way. And the only realistic way that happens is serious competition on cost.

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