alt Hacker News> Wait. ARR has no precise definition but has a clear social understanding.
This is (historically) a recipe for fraud and badness. If ARR is important enough to be reported, then there should be a GAAP definition.
Do you use calendar month or four week rolling? Do you account for seasonality? How do you recognise revenue? (My sense is that Anthropic do sketchy things with credits, as the consumer ones last for like 180 days and then expire).
ARR is a really, really, really easy metric to make sound like whatever you want which is why I am sceptical of it.
EDIT: I looked at the tweet which is a screenshot of a supposed sheet that Ed built. Unless you have a source for the sheet then I'll need to assign this relatively low credibility (don't know the user, it's a screenshot with no link).
> But I’m a curious little critter and went ahead and added up all of the times that Anthropic had talked about its annualized revenue from 2025 onward, and the results — which you can find with links here! — and based on my calculations, just using published annualized revenues gets us to $4.837 billion.
It’s here in the blog.
> This is (historically) a recipe for fraud and badness. If ARR is important enough to be reported, then there should be a GAAP definition.
This is orthogonal to Ed misunderstanding ARR.