Are OpenAI and Anthropic losing money on inference?

https://www.axios.com/2025/08/15/sam-altman-gpt5-launch-chat... quotes Sam Altman saying:

> Most of what we're building out at this point is the inference [...] We're profitable on inference. If we didn't pay for training, we'd be a very profitable company.

From the latest NYT Hard Fork podcast [1]. The hosts were invited to a dinner hosted by Sam, where Sam said "we're profitable if we remove training from the equation", they report he turned to Lightcap (COO) and asked "right?" and Lightcap gave an "eeekk we're close".

They aren't yet profitable even just on inference, and its possible Sam didn't know that until very recently.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/22/podcasts/is-this-an-ai-bu...

“We’re not profitable even if we discount training costs.”

and

“Inference revenue significantly exceeds inference costs.”

are not incompatible statements.

So maybe only the first part of Sam’s comment was correct.