Today · episode October 16

Bian calls 30-40% inference margins good; whose isn't said

Richard Bian, product operations lead for Ant Group's Ling models, says 30% to 40% gross margin on inference is already good, against about 95% for software

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Why it matters: Bian's 30% to 40% is about inference serving, while the 85% that Bloomberg and the Financial Times reported for Anthropic is a company-wide adjusted margin. The two figures can't show whether closed or open model businesses have the better margins.

ChinaTalk is a show on Chinese tech and policy hosted by Jordan Schneider. The October 16 episode interviews Richard Bian (ChinaTalk, 2026-10-16). Ling is the large-model series from Ant Group, the parent company of Alipay. Bian says: "What really concerns me is the gross margin." Bian's comparison: "the gross margin on software is probably 95%", and "Thirty or forty percent is already pretty good on inference". One of Bian's answers is to route simple requests to a cheap model and send only hard ones to a frontier model. Requests the cheap model handles cost less.

The October 15 issue's "Also happened" section noted Bloomberg and Financial Times reports that Anthropic disclosed a third-quarter adjusted gross margin of 85% to investors. Bian's figure is far lower, and that gap is what this episode adds.

Not proven yet: which kind of company Bian's 30% to 40% refers to isn't said on the show How we checked →

Judgment update: This issue sets Bian's number beside Anthropic's 85% as two pieces of evidence pointing in opposite directions. They are measured differently, so they can't yet be compared directly. One reading is that margins split between closed frontier businesses and open low-price ones. We are not adding it to our long-term watchlist until the evidence converges. Investor note: Comparing model companies on inference margin first requires aligning how each is measured; these two numbers alone can't tell whether the closed or the open business has the better structure. Telling them apart would take at least one company publishing an inference margin that says clearly whether training amortization is included. This is a reading we are still testing.

Source and checks

This item ran in the brief of Oct 17, 2026, alongside 15 other items. How we checked it, the quote checks and what was still missing that day are on that issue's How we checked page.

Cite this item

SecondSource (2026). "Bian calls 30-40% inference margins good; whose isn't said." https://secondsource.io/en/news/2026-10-17-4/. Accessed access date.