Ed Zitron just published two pieces on Where’s Ed: “The Beginning of History” (March 10) and “Why Are We Still Doing This?” (March 17).

They land a clean hit on Anthropic’s hallucinations in financial storytelling. The math is simple enough that it can’t be denied. Let me show you how.

What Anthropic Told the Court

Anthropic’s Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao filed an affidavit on March 9, meaning he swore it was true, in their lawsuit against the Department of Defense. It stated that Anthropic’s total revenue “to date” was “exceeding $5 billion.” That’s all the money Anthropic has ever made, from its founding day through March 9, 2026.

What Anthropic Told Everyone Else

Throughout 2025 and into 2026, Anthropic repeatedly announced its “annualized revenue”, which doesn’t match the affidavit.

Say you run a lemonade stand. In July, you sell $10 worth of lemonade. Someone asks how your business is doing. Instead of saying “I made ten dollars, that is true,” you say: “I have a $120-a-year pace no doubt!” That’s annualized revenue. You take one month of actual money, multiply by twelve prediction months, and report the biggest number you can.

Here are the annualized revenue figures Zitron compiled from Anthropic’s own announcements and press coverage, with sources:

The right column is the story. If annualized revenue means “this month times twelve,” then dividing by twelve gives you what they actually made each month.

The Addition

Now when we add up the monthly revenues we see a problem. This is where Where’s Ed earns his keep. Anthropic told the world at ten different points how much it grew. Each implies starting from an actual monthly number. Add them up, estimate the gaps between announcements, and you get a total.

Zitron’s figure: roughly $6.66 billion in implied cumulative revenue through early March 2026.

The CFO’s sworn figure: “exceeding $5 billion.”

Those numbers are not a match.

Ten reports across fourteen months, each covering a distinct measurement period. Zitron’s gap-period estimates are even conservative for the uncovered stretches between reports. He uses the lower ARR figure rather than interpolating upward. The $6.66 billion is a floor way higher than $5 billion, not a ceiling.

The Speedometer and the Odometer

You don’t even need the full table to see the problem. Just take the last four months. December 2025 through early March 2026, using Anthropic’s own ARR figures, implies roughly $4.25 billion in revenue ($750M + $750M + $1.17B + $1.58B). That would have to mean everything before December 2025, which would be the entire prior history of the company, produced less than $750 million. Look at the table again. That’s impossible.

Think of ARR like a speedometer. It reports how fast you’re going right now. Total revenue is your odometer. It tells you how far you’ve actually traveled.

If the speedometer says you’ve been doing 100 miles per hour for the last hour, but the odometer says you’ve only gone 40 miles, the speedometer is lying. Or more precisely: when you hit 100 for a split second you reported it as your cruising speed.

Rao’s low revenue word choice matters here. He said “exceeding $5 billion” and not “nearly $6 billion,” not “approaching $6 billion.”

In a filing where Anthropic was trying to impress a federal court with its commercial scale, Rao is expected to use the biggest number he can. “Exceeding $5 billion” tells you his real figure is much closer to $5 billion than to $6.

That puts overstatement implied by the ARR figures somewhere around 25–35%!

Which Anthropic Do You Believe?

If the $5 billion lifetime figure is the truth, as sworn under oath in federal court, then the annualized revenue figures don’t mean what they are meant to say. “Annualized” at Anthropic may not mean “last month times twelve.” It might mean best week times fifty-two. Or best day times three-sixty-five. Or something else entirely that makes the number as large as possible.

There is one charitable reading. ARR sometimes counts signed contracts with money promised, not money received. Rao’s “revenue to date” likely means recognized revenue, only money actually earned. If Anthropic has billions in contracts where service hasn’t been delivered yet (possible given the huge boost in February), the ARR looks huge while total revenue stays lower.

But if that’s the explanation, Anthropic was reporting unearned contract value to the press as though it were operating revenue, while reporting actual revenue to the court. That’s not an accounting distinction. That’s two different stories tuned for two different audiences.

Either way, the conclusion is the same.

Every headline that reported Anthropic’s annualized revenue as though it indicated actual business scale was wrong. Every valuation model built on those figures was fed inflated inputs. Every investor who used ARR trajectory to justify Anthropic’s $380 billion valuation was working with a disinformation number.

The lemonade stand making $10 in July that told everyone it is a $120-a-year business? Anthropic somehow screwed that reporting up despite regulators, sophisticated investors and the global financial press. Oh, and despite having AI as its core product. Or is it because of AI?

To believe both the ARR headlines and the CFO’s affidavit, you have to believe that Anthropic’s business was essentially non-existent for its first four years and then suddenly processed 85% of its entire lifetime volume in the last 100 days. Wow.

Zitron cleverly asked for proof.

Anthropic math implies flawed integrity. Just like AI.

Mike Johnson says the Gang of Eight briefings proved Iran posed an imminent threat. Joe Kent, the man whose job was to assess exactly that, says it’s a lie.

Johnson is just a regular politician, with no expertise, who receives briefings. Kent is a seasoned expert who ran the National Counterterrorism Center. One of them resigned claiming an act of integrity. The other one spun even more lies into an embarrassing press conference.

Johnson’s exact words:

Iran was building up ballistic missiles at such a rapid pace that we knew that their plan was to fire them upon Americans.

Oh? But Johnson also said the imminent threat was that Iran was “very close to the enrichment of nuclear capability.”

These are two different claims, and he apparently doesn’t know what he’s saying. That’s a clue. One is a military attack. The other is a development program. Johnson can’t tell the difference, and that makes Johnson’s credibility a big problem for America.

Trump Obliteration Trap

Here’s what makes Johnson’s claims literally impossible. Trump declared on June 24, 2025:

It was my great honor to Destroy All Nuclear facilities & capability, and then, STOP THE WAR!

All done. No threat. Pete Hegseth went further, announcing that Iran’s “nuclear ambitions have been obliterated.” The White House published an entire fact sheet titled

Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated.

Did Johnson protest then? No. So what was the sudden imminent threat in February 2026?

If Trump destroyed all nuclear capability in June 2025, there can be nothing to be imminent about nine months later. If Iran reconstituted in months what Trump said was permanently destroyed, then Trump lied about obliteration and Johnson covered it up for the better part of a year.

Pick one. There is no third option.

CNN reported in June 2025 that an early intelligence assessment found the strikes did not destroy the core components of Iran’s nuclear program. I mean, we know Trump lies like the sky is blue.

The enriched uranium stockpile was not destroyed. The centrifuges were largely intact. The DIA assessment was that the strikes set Iran back “maybe a few months, tops.” Republican Rep. Michael McCaul, the honorable chairman emeritus of House Foreign Affairs, tried to backpedal as if the plan was “never meant to completely destroy the nuclear facilities.” The White House called CNN’s reporting “flat-out wrong” and called the source a “low-level loser.”

Harsh words for someone who doubted Trump and Johnson, obliterating anyone who dared to say the Iran nuclear threat wasn’t eliminated. They said case closed no doubts allowed.

Now it’s March 2026 and Johnson is citing imminent nuclear threat as justification for a second, larger war. The administration’s own timeline convicted them. They said obliteration. They got degradation. They lied about the difference. And now they need the threat to be imminent again, the very same threat they said they eliminated.

A Tale of Two Americans

Johnson’s response to Kent is that Kent “wasn’t in those briefings.” This is backwards. Kent didn’t need to be in the briefings. He was upstream of them. The NCTC produces the threat assessments that inform what the Gang of Eight is told. Johnson was briefed by the people who wanted the war. Kent was the person who would know whether the briefing was true.

Four Things Are Not the Same

Johnson collapses the logic of four distinct categories into one because the legal justification for bypassing Congress requires the word “imminent”:

1. Having enrichment capability is not the same as having a deliverable weapon.
2. Having a deliverable weapon is not the same as having intent to use it.
3. Having intent to use it is not the same as imminent attack.

Iran had the first, partially.

It did not have the second, third, or fourth.

The Defense Intelligence Agency’s own May 2025 assessment said Iran could develop a long-range missile capable of reaching the U.S. by 2035, if it chose to pursue one. The Arms Control Association stated in March 2026 that there is “no imminent threat” and Iran is “not close to weaponizing its nuclear material.” In March 2025, the US intelligence community assessed that Iran was “not building a nuclear weapon.” The distance from Tehran to Washington is about 10,000 kilometers. Iran’s top missile range is 2,000 kilometers.

Johnson’s claim is demonstrably false.

A non-expert view, based on a briefing he probably didn’t even understand, that Iran was about to “fire ballistic missiles upon Americans”, does not survive a basic sniff test. Johnson is not assessing risk. He is incapable. He is performing hyperbolic, emotionally-driven, legal drama as a conclusion, so that Trump doesn’t have to go to Congress and explain their disaster.

Competent Complicity

Kent has issues too, which shine an interesting light on his narrative. He is not a reliable narrator in general because he promoted Trump election conspiracy theories. He had ties to Trump-promoting extreme-right figures. NBC reported that he had pressured intelligence analysts to corrupt their Venezuela assessment so it would match the delusions of Trump. Democrats opposed his confirmation for very good reasons.

Kent’s antisemitic resignation letter erases every other actor. The Saudis, the Gulf states, the domestic defense industry, the neoconservative movement’s own ideological roots, Hegseth’s Christian nationalist militarism, Trump’s own strategic narcissism. It all disappears. Everything becomes Israeli puppet-mastery over a passive America.

And that’s exactly what makes his “line crossed” resignation devastating. He was all in on Trump corruption of intelligence. Even he can’t go further now? This is not a principled critic who was always against the war. This is a loyalist, a Trump-sanctioned appointee, a man who owes his career to this president. That must really bite when he is saying the intelligence does not support Trump. He even framed the letter as an off-ramp for Trump to blame the Jews for everything bad that’s ever happened.

Kent’s letter is nearly identical to Lindbergh’s infamous Des Moines speech in September 1941. Lindbergh named three groups pushing America into war: the British, the Roosevelt administration, and “the Jewish race.” Kent names Israeli officials, the American media, and “Israel’s powerful American lobby.” Same smell different slime. Foreign power manipulates domestic media to deceive a well-meaning leader into a war against the national interest.

America First wasn’t just a slogan adopted from the KKK. It was an organization with antisemitism baked in from the start. Kent isn’t departing from the tradition. He’s completing it, resigning for it.

When the true believer breaks ranks, the institutional lie becomes visible.

Johnson, all that being said, is too ignorant to know how far from reality he floats. He is performing because he isn’t able to be professional. He is a puppet, playing congressional leader, whose constitutional role is oversight. He is using his access to classified briefings as a credential to shut down the person whose professional function was to evaluate whether the briefing was accurate. That’s not oversight. That’s an integrity breach of government, amplification of disinformation.

The administration said obliteration. The intelligence said degradation. The NCTC director said no imminent threat. The Speaker of the House said trust me I’m a small town lawyer with no expertise and a closet full of skeletons.

We have seen this film before. The last time the word “imminent” did this much legal work, Colin Powell was holding a vial at the United Nations.

Face it, there’s nothing heroic or worthy left about this war in Iraq. It’s just a pile of lies. Unless you support lies, the only thing you’re supporting by supporting the war now is Bush.