Anthropic offers glimmer of hope for China AI labs

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The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist.  The opinions expressed are her own.  Refiles to remove extraneous space in fifth paragraph.
By Robyn Mak
HONG KONG, Oct 28 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Anthropic's IPO filing is drawing intense scrutiny from global investors and Chinese rivals alike. The US titan's first-half revenue hit $16 billion, growing faster than Z.AI 2513.HK and MiniMax 0100.HK, and its financials show that investing in frontier artificial intelligence models can pay off. But while the listed Chinese duo's sales lag Anthropic's by only two years each, the real gap may be much larger.
The company co-founded and led by Dario Amodei has revealed formidable strengths. The first is size: Anthropic's top line for the six months to the end of June is 63 times Z.AI and MiniMax's combined showing in the same period. Their American rival benefits from a rapidly expanding and mostly US-based pool of enterprises paying as much as $10 million a year to use its Claude family of models.
Heady growth puts the US company on a path to shoring up its bottom line too. Anthropic is still splurging on computing power and infrastructure to deploy and train large language models - those costs nearly quadrupled year-on-year to $8.9 billion in the first six months of 2026. But it is benefiting from hardware and software efficiencies and generating more revenue per dollar of compute. It turned an operating profit of $1.6 billion in the period, albeit on an adjusted basis.
By contrast, Chinese AI labs, hobbled by US chip export controls, have a long way to go. Their skimpy revenue partly reflects that their models are free to download. They only charge users for access and customisations - and at ultra-low prices. That has resulted in brutal economics: the cost of training competitive models, as reflected in research and development expenses, dwarfs each of MiniMax and Z.AI's top lines.
Z.AI's annualised first-half 2026 revenue of $284 million puts it roughly where Anthropic was in 2024, when the US firm generated just $386 million in sales. MiniMax is in a similar position. But factor in slow enterprise adoption in China, alongside fierce domestic competition, and it is suddenly hard to see Z.AI or MiniMax commanding Anthropic's pricing power for their models and agents. Z.AI's flagship GLM 5.2 model is widely considered frontier-level and costs on average nearly a third less to use than Claude Opus 5.5, per Artificial Analysis.
Sure, Anthropic's finances will look different as soon as it plans "substantial capital expenditures" to secure its own compute. For now, its performance is highlighting the gap between US and China AI companies.
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CONTEXT NEWS
Anthropic reported revenue in the six months to June 30 of $16.3 billion, up from $1.2 billion a year earlier, per the company's US IPO filing released on October 26. Adjusted operating income for the period was $1.6 billion.
      Since 2025, the company reclassified its operating expenses based on the nature of expenses, such as compute and infrastructure, personnel, sales, marketing and partnerships and others.
Compute and infrastructure, primarily costs from research and model development and serving customers, rose to $8.9 billion in the first half, up from $2.3 billion last year.

(Editing by Una Galani; Production by Aditya Srivastav)
((For previous columns by the author, Reuters customers can click on MAK/  robyn.mak@thomsonreuters.com))