Lying With Charts, AI Edition ⭐

Most are familiar with the notion of lying with statistics and that you can contort data to prove just about anything. But a Reuters report about Anthropic's financials provides a fresh reminder of how data--or, in this case, visualizations of that data, can distort the truth.

This is interesting to me because I don't believe that Reuters is trying to deceive anyone. But the way it presented data from the Anthropic initial public offering (IPO) prospectus it viewed is patently deceptive and serves to contradict the information it published. That is, the Anthropic IPO prospectus paints an ugly picture of the company's finances, while the charts that Reuters created to visualize that data make things seem better than they are.

Consider the following three charts.
Anthropic's losses over the past three years

Anthropic's revenues over the past three years

Anthropic's computing/infrastructure expenses over the past three years

In each case, you see a massive escalation, meaning the numbers for 2025 are dramatically higher than those from 2024, which are in turn dramatically higher than those from 2023. This is what one might expect from a young company--Anthropic was founded in 2021, just five years ago--experiencing the type of massive growth that's only possible when you start out small. But there's a big problem with these charts. Can you see it?

The problem is the scale.

Each chart takes up the same space, visually, in its horizontal and vertical dimensions. But the number range in the first chart--annual losses in dollar amounts--is much higher than the range in the other two charts. This is deceptive because it makes it seem like Anthropic's losses are massive and growing but are doing so at rates similar to its revenue gains (up "12-fold in 2025") and compute expenses.

An accurate visualization of this data shows something quite different. With apologies for the laziness of me not typing all this data into Excel and making my own chart, when you scale the revenue and compute expense charts to match that of the losses (vertically reversed to make the comparisons easier), it looks like so.

That is, where the chart for the losses goes from $0 to (negative) $42 billion, the other two charts depict a range of just $0 to $5/$8 billion.

Which, again, I don't see as purposeful deception on Reuters' part and more as just a basic formatting decision. But still.

Also, this report leaves off what I feel is the most important visualization, which is a comparison of Anthropic's spending over the previous three years and the next three or five years. That looks like so:

The obvious retort here is that I don't have all the data. The Reuters report doesn't mention revenues or costs for 2021 or 2022, for example, and it notes that the $518 billion in spending will occur over "the coming years," not in the next three or five years. But the two assumptions I made are reasonable and don't change the overall picture...