DailyAI Briefing: Anthropic's $17bn quarter ends in a loss

Welcome to the DailyAI Briefing, the day’s five biggest AI stories. Anthropic’s updated IPO filing shows a $17 billion quarter that still ended in an operating loss, because rushed computing power cost far more than planned. OpenAI says ChatGPT now handles a fifth as many searches as Google, Google is making schools switch off Search if they want AI off, China is speeding up a single AI law, and stolen AI keys are running up million-dollar bills.

Let’s dig in.

Anthropic’s $17 billion quarter ends in a loss

$567 million. That’s the operating loss Anthropic reported for the three months to 30 September, on revenue of about $17 billion, in the amended IPO filing it sent to the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. In the June quarter it made an operating profit of $974 million. The filing blames “$5.0 billion of compute under short-term commitments, which currently costs significantly more” than computing power bought on multi-year deals, plus $2.0 billion of non-cash charges from its staff donation-matching programme.

Computing and infrastructure costs came to $9.9 billion, about 58% of revenue, up from 48% the quarter before. Quarterly revenue growth also slowed to around 47%, from 144% in the second quarter, CNBC noted. The filing lists about $895.4 billion of committed spending, almost all of it on compute, through to 2045. It also says Anthropic’s own forecasts suggest it “may imminently meet” its safety policy’s threshold for “dramatically accelerated progress attributable to AI”, though no current model has been judged to cross it. The plain reading: demand for Claude is outrunning the chips Anthropic signed up for, and buying the gap at short notice is expensive.

OpenAI says ChatGPT runs a fifth as many searches as Google

One for every five. That’s how many search-like queries ChatGPT now handles compared with Google, according to Adam Fry, who leads ChatGPT’s consumer product, speaking to Big Technology. He also said weekly users rose from 1 billion to 1.2 billion in two months. OpenAI didn’t say how it counted Google’s side, and every web lookup inside a chat counts as a separate search.

OpenAI says ChatGPT processes one-fifth the volume of search queries as Google.
— The Verge November 3, 2026

Outside estimates are much lower. seoClarity puts it at about 7.5%, and Ahrefs estimated around 12% in February, while finding that Google sends roughly 190 times more visitors to websites. For anyone who runs a site, the clicks matter more than the searches, and those are still small. Our story sets the figures side by side.

Google makes schools choose between AI and Search

Gemini and Google Search “will be entirely off for K-12 student accounts until school administrators explicitly turn them on”, Google’s education chief Chris Phillips wrote on Tuesday. Schools can switch Search back on without the Gemini apps, but Search still brings AI Overviews with it. “Search and AI are deeply integrated,” Phillips said, according to Education Week.

Google announces it will switch off AI products by default for students at schools using its education software. But schools that opt out of its AI services will also lose access to Google Search.
— NBC News November 4, 2026

Making AI opt-in for children is a sensible default. The trouble is that Google already offers a Web filter that shows only text links without AI Overviews, so a link-only school setting is clearly possible. In our opinion piece we argue Google should offer exactly that, so a cautious school doesn’t have to give up search to say no to AI.

China speeds up a single AI law

More than 700 million people in China now use generative AI, over half the population, according to official data released in September. On Tuesday, Wang Ruomeng of the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s state economic planner, said Beijing will “accelerate” one comprehensive AI law, at a press conference in Beijing. According to the Beijing Daily, it would come with rules for data, computing power and algorithms, incident reporting for AI firms, monitoring of AI’s effect on jobs, and protections against deepfakes and emotional dependence on chatbots.

There’s no draft text, deadline or penalties yet, and a draft AI law has sat on the State Council’s work plan since 2023, Caixin notes. Still, the job-monitoring and incident-reporting parts could produce public numbers on AI’s harms that few governments publish. We covered the details this morning.

Stolen AI keys run up million-dollar bills

More than $100,000 a day, and $1 million in total at some firms before anyone noticed. That’s what criminals have cost companies by stealing their AI access, according to a report from Google Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant. Attackers take leaked cloud logins and API keys, switch on AI services the victim never used, and resell the access. One reseller, Jet Night, made more than 500,000 AI calls on a single victim’s keys in under eight hours and sells an unlimited plan for about $60 a month.

LLMJacking needs to be on your radar. Threat actors have used leaked IAM and GitHub keys to enable cloud LLM services, route stolen quotas to underground “LLM Mixers,” and rack up $100K/day bills. Defend using our playbook
— Mandiant (part of Google Cloud) November 4, 2026

Request volumes can jump past 1,000 a second, BleepingComputer reported, and the AI provider simply bills it as normal use. Google’s advice is basic: rotate keys, scan code for leaked secrets, and set spending caps and alerts. If an AI deal looks far cheaper than the official price, someone else may be paying for it. Our story explains how the scheme works.

Signing off

Today kept coming back to the bill. Anthropic is paying a premium for compute it didn’t plan for, companies are paying for AI they never used, and schools may pay for opting out of AI with their search engine. Meanwhile, ChatGPT is counting its searches in a way that makes it look closer to Google than outside data suggests.

See you tomorrow.