Anthropic's 85.4% first-half gross margin versus Zhipu's 26.4%: compute, not discounting, explains the gap
Anthropic's IPO prospectus is the first document to price the frontier-lab business, and it puts Z.AI's 26.4% gross margin next to Anthropic's 85.4%. The leak is not the discounting the press describes; it is who owns the compute.
Vincent Jiang · 3 min read
On Sunday night, China's most famous livestreamer sold a product no shopper can hold. Li Jiaqi, the "Lipstick King" who once moved 15,000 lipsticks in five minutes, moved nearly 100,000 monthly subscriptions to QwenWork, Alibaba's−0.97% — Alibaba, down 0.97 percent today AI office platform, at 0.01 yuan each on his Double 11 stream: roughly 2 trillion tokens, the unit of model usage, sold in 30 minutes for less than 1,000 yuan of revenue 23. Tokens have become a retail category on Tmall and JD.com+2.91% — JD.com, up 2.91 percent today this shopping festival, with Zhipu−7.99% — Zhipu, down 7.99 percent today, MiniMax and Moonshot selling on the same shelves 23.
The prospectus priced the other end of the trade
Five days earlier, Anthropic's S-1 filing, the first public document to price a frontier-lab business, put hard numbers on both sides of the Pacific 1. The Claude developer booked $16.3 billion of first-half 2026 revenue at an 85.4% gross margin 1. Z.ai, the Tsinghua spin-out behind GLM and China's first listed AI lab, booked $141 million at 26.4% 1. MiniMax booked $116.6 million at 17.9% 1.
Anthropic keeps 85 cents of each revenue dollar; Z.ai keeps 26
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Anthropic | 85.4% |
| Z.ai | 26.4% |
| MiniMax | 17.9% |
Six months of revenue: the frontier lab versus China's listed labs
- H1 2026 revenue
- Estimate
Data
| H1 2026 revenue | |
|---|---|
| Anthropic | $16.3B |
| Z.ai (estimate) | $0.14B |
| MiniMax (estimate) | $0.12B |
Discounts are not the leak, compute is
The consensus says Chinese labs buy users with discounts. The ministry-affiliated China Academy of Information and Communications Technology reported on October 23 that API prices for new 2026 models from the five big Chinese developers averaged 13.46 yuan per million tokens, up 98% from 6.8 yuan in late 2025 3. Prices are rising, not collapsing 3.
What differs is the machine bill. HSBC calculates Anthropic generated $2.08 of revenue per dollar of computing resources in the second quarter against Z.ai's 46 cents, because Anthropic$350B — Anthropic, private, latest valuation $350B locks in capacity 12 to 18 months ahead while the Chinese labs rent compute as a service 15. Every token Z.ai serves pays a cloud vendor first.
The receipts follow. Anthropic's gross profit covered its R&D spending about 1.4 times in the first half; Zhipu's covered about one-eighth, MiniMax's about one-fourteenth 1. "Low prices can win usage, but at today's margins they cannot fund research," tech analyst Poe Zhao said. "For now, the capital market pays for the gap" 1.
The bull case is the 23x
Z.ai's revenue per compute dollar rose 23-fold in a year, the fastest improvement of any lab in the HSBC note, and GLM now helps train its own successor 1. Renting preserves flexibility Anthropic does not have: the S-1 discloses about $417 billion in future compute obligations and revenue that is mostly consumption-based, and Anthropic itself swung to a $567 million operating loss in the third quarter 14. Z.ai's shares still fell about 13% after the prospectus landed, against MiniMax's 2% 1.
Two dates tell the story
Watch whether a Chinese lab launches its next top model at a higher price and customers pay it, which Zhao calls the real test 1, and whether 0.01-yuan bargain hunters renew at the 28-yuan list price 3. Anthropic begins formally marketing its IPO the week of November 9 and expects to trade before Thanksgiving, at a valuation institutional investors have marked down toward $1.5 trillion to $1.6 trillion 16. The landlord collects rent in both stories. The question is who ever gets to own the land.
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