OK, so their self-reported run-rate revenue hit $47bn in early May.
For comparison:
Apr 6th 2026: https://www.anthropic.com/news/google-broadcom-partnership-c... - "Demand from Claude customers has accelerated in 2026. Our run-rate revenue has now surpassed $30 billion—up from approximately $9 billion at the end of 2025."
So that's $30bn at the start of April.
Feb 12th 2026: https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-30-billion-s... - "Today, our run-rate revenue is $14 billion, with this figure growing over 10x annually in each of those past three years."
That was $14bn on Feb 12th.
And $9bn in December (according to the above April 6th link.)
Existing corporate command and control has optimized for people control, because people cost money and performed work. Control their assignments, and you control costs and what's worked on.
Widespread unmetered AI turns this on its head, because suddenly each employee is directing their own work and the AI spend that comes with it.
F.ex. Bob in accounting may think it's a brilliant idea to rebuild Lotus 1-2-3.
That may help Bob, but 10x'ing Bob's spreadsheet output doesn't change the company's profitability, because it wasn't a limiting factor. It was to Bob, but not to the company's revenue generators.
HN didn't like this article when it hit, but I thought it made a good point that corporate C2 is going to be the first thing AI adoption breaks: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonwingard/2026/04/23/vibe-co...
Increasing AI spend without profitability improvements is a symptom that C2 is failing (or was insufficient to begin with).
Seen through a charitable "CEOs know what the fuck they're doing" lens, the preemptive layoffs are about forcing AI efficiency gains in areas CEOs expect them: instead of allowing those departments' remaining employees to build their own apps, they're forced to deploy AI to cover for their missing 3 team members.
Unfortunately, the layoffs were executed before there were solid results about which departments could benefit from AI use (and without a plan for continuity of institutional knowledge), so... we'll see.
I get what you're saying about how every employee becomes a liability when they are let loose with an AI, and totally agree. But I think the layoffs have a much more financial root because they are so widespread across so many companies and even industries (not just tech)
Layoffs + access to AI forces most of that AI use to make up for the layoffs.
Which is a pretty shitty way to burn your employees out... but it has a method.
(Also, I'd say AI infra companies vs everyone else are apples to oranges. This point would be more applicable to a non-AI infra company that's paying for AI use rather than AI infra capital)
Turn a potential existential competition into (a) maybe I win or (b) I commoditize the market and you can't make money at it either.
How'd Microsoft's mobile efforts go?
Sometimes the lead quickly becomes insurmountable, so if you're sitting on a cash flow machine it's not a terrible idea to at least keep pace with new markets.
1) I have a new extra cost 2) How does that make me more profit, and improved cashflow
I know I'll be bombarded with metrics about productivity, feature completion, bug fixes etc. But someone is going to have to tell me how that equates to more sales. And who is going to do that? I'll be worried that the feature wishlist will just creep up now we can handle more throughput, and yet everyone will be telling me that I don't need to worry about the lack of new customers this quarter, one more new feature and we will catch up in Q4. You can see how that could make one grumpy. Then when the sales don't come, I'll tell the CTO that they need to balance the books, if they want to use expensive tools to make each developer more productive then they will need fewer developers...
...but I don't want that, I want more great features that people will pay for, and faster. But they have to pay for themselves.
When one is under the grip of irrational exuberance and FOMO due diligence goes out the window.
For example look at Sequoia’s investment into FTX and article about Sam that accompanied.
If for no other reason than they would rather spend their days procrastinating on everything else, so they can obsess over some of the most interesting numbers they will ever see.
ARR seems like a interesting concept which hides away the concrete details and is counting on a futuristic possible commitment especially for companies at this early stages. The crucial detail is probably the money being spent, that is what is fueling this sale of equity at this point.
Yes, it is a meaningful financial measure of actual progress, exactly where progress is most needed for a new company.
> which hides away the concrete details
A normal metric isn't a magic trick. It's just the number it is.
> The crucial detail is probably the money being spent
Accelerating (not just fast) revenue growth at an astounding rate, with absolute numbers that are enormous for a new company, bonkers for a 2500 employee startup [0], is the crucial "detail".
There are lots of companies with deep pockets and compute, making great AI efforts with teams of smart people, that would love to be doing, but are not doing, what Anthropic is doing and doing well. That might be the second crucial detail.
ARR as a number for steady business or public company is much simpler, ARR for companies at this early stage fueled by the motivation for IPO is more than just a number. Its an attempt to convince the market for a certain outcome without revealing the books
> Accelerating (not just fast) revenue growth at an astounding rate
This acceleration is fueled by somewhat artificial demand (AI mandates by executives across the board, still figuring out the realistic use cases) and subsidized pricing. The expenses matter cause they are the ones which are going to dictate if the business is sustainable or not.
Of course ARR is simpler for less dynamic companies. Tautology.
Of course a PR is a communication to the market. Also a tautology.
You are framing functional numbers and behavior as fraudulent because... a newsy PR isn't a formal disclosure?
Cynicism is fine. However: accusations should reference some evidence, not just distrust.
If you think investment banks will catch them during the IPO: They have launched many overpriced IPOs in 1999/2000 and also want a high IPO price.
Historically, listing rules asked: "How much money did you make last year, and do you fit our standard corporate governance box?"
Today, NASDAQ's rules ask: "Do you have the massive market capitalisation, sufficient institutional public float, and transparent liquidity to ensure fair and orderly trading?"
Here are the obvious ones:
1. Free float - Every company that intended to list was required to have at least 20% free float.
2. Index weights were based on the free float.
3. Time before inclusion into the Indices (min 12 months) now 15 trading days
4. Lockup period - minimum 12 months up to 24 months - not 180 days.
I wish people would understand that if America had a functioning criminal justice system, no one would have heard Elon Musk nor Donald Trump.
"The passive funds holding trillions of dollars of 401(k)s and other investments are rushing to change their rules as the IPOs of SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic draw closer."
Those index providers are the same interest class with VCs. With such moves they inflate demand post-IPO (hoping it holds for 180+ days), but also allows them to lure buyers in private secondary market and offload that shit pre-IPO.
https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/stock-indexes-are-contort...
Not to mention even a total shitshow from an obvious crackpot like Theranos got $1.2 billion total funding, and a 9B valuation. Or FTX.
In my new job I haven't written a single line by hand. I now almost entirely work in claude code / codex and in github PRs. Occasionally I open vscode to read code, but very rarely. My company probably spends ~$100 a day for my token use. I'm not even going crazy with parallelization or subagents and such.
I 100% believe the demand growth based on my personal experience.
> They are not obligated to be truthful here
Update: this inspired a note on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/29/anthropic/
This one client, then, is 12.8% of Anthropic's run-rate revenue? That does not exactly fill me with confidence that it's a meaningful number. Doesn't this suggest run-rate revenue will fall off a cliff if Anthropic customers start applying cost controls?
As an anecdote, Github is changing their copilot plan to usage based billing next month. They released a tool that allows their users to estimate what their bills will look like under the new plan based on their past usage. There are some screenshots online from users showing their plans will go from $40/month to $3-5k/month. I imagine this is happening everywhere. These tools absolutely can do more than they were capable of just six months ago. But if the true costs are as high as it appears, folks are going to be much more judicious with how they use them moving forward.
People confuse price with cost all the time. The price of Opus has dropped from $75/1M output tokens to $25. That's the price. The cost is much lower and according to Dario, about a month ago, they had about a 73% margin.
I don't understand how anyone would use GitHub copilot...it's basically running a custom harness and using close to API pricing for Opus. This is why Microsoft is cooked in this game.
But yeah, I don't understand why people switch from subscription to API prices for Claude. They're way higher, but again that's price and not necessarily the cost to Anthropic to serve.
And FYI, most enterprise accounts were forced to switch to a hybrid monthly seat license plus API based usage earlier this year. So that is why we are probably seeing so much alarm over Ai bills at the enterprise level. Companies went whole hog on agentic workflows not fully appreciating the costs structures of their new plans. Didn't help that pretty much every VC and board was probably breathing down their neck that if they didn't jump on the AI bandwagon they would get left behind.
Do you have a source for this? I missed this and it does not match my impression.
There were a lot of people (here included) that were absolutely abusing github - getting Opus to generate its own subagents for days on end with a single premium request. If THAT'S $3k/mo, I'm honestly not worried.
I was just asking sonnet, 5.4, opus, in single agent session to fix a problem for 20 minutes...if THAT'S $3k/mo, then AI is truly cooked.
I think for your use case, the most likely outcome is that you are going to need to be on a $100-200 month plan if you want access to the cutting edge models. But on the other end of the spectrum, you could probably get closer to $10-20 month using Chinese models. My usage was closer to yours, with the occasional tokenmaxxing sprint just to experiment a bit and test out the limits of the plan. I am not quite sure what I will be doing next month once it moves to API billing but I suspect I will move to openrouter and one of the open source CLI harnesses.
If they really did count that one customer as $6B it means they've gone from $30B in April to a mere $41B in May.
im really not sure why he keeps parroting on about this. its all irrelevant frankly. companies play games. non-gaap revenue recognition, adjusted operating income.... boo-ya.
wait for the somewhat official doc's to come out, then its worth talking about.
What we are talking about is entirely based on this one term in the announcement: run-rate revenue. This is a meaningless term just like how “clinically proven” for vitamins is a way for the companies to use weasel words to imply something without truly being able to back it up, but also not actually lying. There is no legal definition of “clinically proven” so, what exactly would you sue them for? The same thing is true for run-rate revenue. They can cherry pick numbers to use to generate the run-rate revenue value and they are not lying, but this isn’t exactly honest either. We have no transparency and run-rate revenue is not an accounting term.
This goes back to my entire point, this is a vibe. This announcement does not provide much in the way of substance, so a reader will take it to say whatever they want.
IDK if these tricks would work anymore but then again fraud is legal now so who knows.
In the US?
Hahaha, that was a good one, buddy.
like when you owe a bank a billion dollars, thats the banks problem.
Hard to imagine what a world with 100GW of compute looks like.
[1] https://epochai.substack.com/p/frontier-labs-dont-use-most-a...
^^ This quotes 1.4GW at the end of 2025. Add 0.3GW at Colossus 1, and some initial fraction of 1GW Trainium2 from [2]
I think token counts and GW are a gross over simplification here. Not all tokens are the same in the amount of GPU time they consume or the size of the GPUs they require or the amount of energy they consume. There's a huge optimization potential here once these companies get serious about consolidating the business they have and executing much more efficiently. Given enough time, these companies can heavily optimize their operations. Short term growth and not slamming the brakes on that is their primary concern.
I have been trying Claude Code with DeepSeek 4 apis, and the experience is barely different. In fact the margin of error is so small that harness and prompting account for the most impact in output quality.
But, here's the catch: I spend barely more than a handful of dollars per day of regular usage. In fact DS4 via api is cheaper than Claude 100$ subscription.
I really think that very soon many will start realizing that the alternatives are extremely close in performance but dramatically different in pricing.
funny enough - those 2 might not meet. then what happens ?
Instead of ARR they should report actual revenue for once.
And many more that are 50% of what they were: Snowflake, Coinbase
And many more that went back to private companies and then were sold off: Carbon Black, etc...
I'm actually too lazy to go list out all of them.
But employees, beware, of those gnarly lockup periods post IPO where all the better classed options than yours get to exit.
this gives a nice comfy exit to many late-stage investors, etc.
and, of course, it's hard to say that it's great that these companies are mere shadows of themselves post-IPO, but also it's impossible to non-misleadingly assess each IPO as if they were in a vacuum.
obviously Coinbase is/was a stupid venture, but at the same time it was a pretty good bet at the time. and the same stands for a lot of these.
Ipos are somewhat notoriously risky investments.
But with OpenAI and SpaceX IPOing roughly at the same time it will likely be more than fraction of a % in this/next year.
No, this was not allowed. Until a certain someone with deep connections to the corrupt government (coughspacexcough) changed the rules for themselves for the upcoming IPO. It's going to be.... ballistic.
of course, public markets nowadays are definitely paying a pretty serious "agent-principal premium". (since public exits are usually very good for the C-suite and for all those vested stocks.)
but that's the cost of access to equity (compared to PE - which nowadays underperforms public markets https://www.hamiltonlane.com/2026-market-overview/performanc... )
so yeah, it seems it would make sense to buy the post-IPO dip, but then you would need to have some kind of formula for that, and ... that seems ripe for gaming by speculators ... so all in all, it's just more efficient to do what the rule of the index says. (and of course there's already speculation at the discontinuity.)
yes, directly buying a stock at IPO sounds really strange for me. (because either you know it's undervalued, but then it's insider trading. if not, then why compete with irrational fanatics?)
Lots of professional investors are passing on the SpaceX IPO for example, which is why they had to increase the share of the retail investors.
They are dumping them on your 401k -- especially SpaceX.
So IPO is not particularly a liquidity event for investors as much as a valuation/pricing event. Indeed, the tech IPO's that have done the worst were the ones where shareholders wanted liquidity.
Clearly none of the multi-trillion dollar companies could find a buyer now if they really needed to sell themselves, so they're not really "worth" that much. (Nor are their founders, who can't sell their shares without tanking the stock.)
So these stocks are more like derivatives: a way to bet on the future where betting volume is huge relative to the underlying asset.
index funds will be the cause of the next catastrophic collapse
2. Shit goes to 0. Your 401(k) invested into S&P 500 takes a dive (dump phase)
3. Retail holding bags (full of shit) phase.
Case study: Tesla, with a P/E ratio in the hundreds along with declining sales and TAM, is a part of the S&P 500 and, consequently, of many people's 401(k)s.
And then when you sell your units, hopefully in aggregate the index is worth more than it was when you entered...
We got "dumped" Google and Facebook, so... Those probably made up for all the other "dumps".
We also got "dumped" TSLA, which is meme-ing in the trillions at the moment.
You can short Anthropic at IPO if you want...
A trillion dollar valuation seemed so hard back in the day and now there are so many companies in that list. What's the next level?
Is this just signs that $ is no longer the inflating at the same rate over time and its the realistic inflation that is reflecting in the stock market?
Prices of all goods surely has to follow to make up for the revenue needed to sustain these valuations and also the salaries to sustain the prices.
Unfortunately, those who are not in the loop is not going to have a good time.
Yeah, looking back. At the time, I distinctly remember people were going batshit over the insane FB valuation. It wasn't at all obvious it was justified.
Hindsight is 20/20.
If you try to configure the index-fund to avoid this problem it is not longer passively managed as each new stock needs to be evaluated in a (at least) semi-subjective manner.
IPO was in the 50B $ valuation range, and at the time, there wasn't any hint it made any financial sense.
Of course, hindsight is hindsight, but for every Facebook there's been countless IPOs of tech companies shrinking their IPO valuations by 90% in the following years.
While we could claim that such a company can grow by consuming a larger share of the GDP ... this would not bode well for future political stability, and nationalization would be a major topic.
So your left with a fast take off scenario, a job apocalypse, or a massively reduced growth rate.
Situations change.
Because when Facebook IPO'd everyone was saying the stock market was a dumping ground...
Same with Google...
Same with Pets.com and WebVan...
But you, of course, can buy on their IPO. They need every bagholder they can get :)
Companies that reached a level of maturity where going public make sense don't keep doing funding rounds to cover the rate at which they bleed money.
I moved all my money outside US index and global index funds because of SpaceX and OpenAI. At least until these IPOs have passed I will not move any money back. The sheer size of these IPOs might trigger a market crash.
A lot of the money that is deployed by VCs comes from pension funds and asset managers that ultimately manage money for the average Joe.
Well, I will enjoy it while it lasts.
Run-rate is taking a recent measurement and multiplying it out so it will span a year. Basically, it assumes they keep all of their current contracts, and don't gain any new ones.
Forward-looking revenue is an estimate of what the integral will be from now to a year from now.
For a growing company, run rate is between past revenue and estimates of future revenue.
Forward-looking revenue estimates are often made up from whole cloth so are highly untrustworthy. But a run-rate is saying "we've already been making this much money, we just need to maintain where we are and that's how much we'll bring in". Backward-looking revenue for something like Anthropic is meaningless because almost all of their customer base is recently acquired - they're growing like crazy, not 20% per year.
So, it's saying something but without more details it's also vague and always partially forward looking. I prefer the TTM metric (Trailing Twelve Month revenue).
Along the lines of "in the 4.75 hours starting at 02:35 yesterday we collected invoices worth $X so our run-rate revenue is now $Y"?
Occasionally it can be a snapshot if you've just completed a big contract - but it's what you expect to get per month if you're not growing or shrinking for the typical SaaS that charges per month (and assuming yearly pre-paid contracts renew etc.)
When there are interesting stories that can't be told with GAAP metrics, accountants derive new metrics. Just because they haven't gone through the standardization process yet doesn't mean they're bullshit - investors in Anthropic can hire auditors to ensure the Anthropic metrics are still meaningful. There are a very small number of deep pocketed investors in Anthropic - they're not a public company like Enron trying to sell to the WSB crowd, or like 2007 CDOs being sold to dentists.
And run rate has been a widely recognized metric for SaaS as long as it has existed - it has meaning and can be audited.
it's
(revenue of this month) * 12
that means, of course, if you make $1000 in january, your RRR is $12000.
...even if you end up making $0 every other month and thus only $1000 total that year.
thats why RRR is perhaps harmful. especially when it's not growing. it can be much bigger than the actual revenue. in anthropics case it's rapidly climbing, though, so it underestimates revenue if that growth keeps up
Things change fast in this space. Anthropic had a big boost from having the premier coding model for a while, but GPT-5.5 has closed that gap at a time when a lot of Anthropic customers are looking for cheaper alternatives.
Anthropic is coming off of a recent change to their enterprise billing that substantially changed the pricing for many users. They were smart to do the fundraising before the effects of that change could fully propagate.
My wife knows about Claude because that's what I use and we pay for. She uses it also as a result. And inevitably she will talk about Claude to her friends.
For enterprise, Anthropic is crushing it. In the manufacturing sector I anecdotally hear a 2:1 ratio of Claude to ChatGPT for teams who are settling on a platform.
Unfortunately even though we have a degree or two of seperation from most federal contracts the punitive DoD blacklisting had enough of a chilling effect on our legal team to make them drag their feet on approving any contract involving Anthropic.
So I pitched OpenAI Business with Codex so we could drop our Github Copilot Business subscription before the billing change takes effect June 1st which was approved without pushback.
I felt some responsibility for finding an immediate solution to dump Copilot since I was the one who recommended adopting Copilot in the first place, ugh... Our prices would have quadrupled based on the single month Microsoft in their beneficence allowed previewing with their tool to simulate what the post-rug pull pricing would have looked like.
Codex becoming more or less a 1:1 replacement for CC made that a no brainer given our options and the exploitative value proposition of Copilot under the new pricing model (which Microsoft evidently hoped companies like us would just accept despite being a third tier option in the dev space these days).
Absolutely not, you live in a bubble. Everybody knows about ChatGPT.
Few non-programmers have heard of anthropic or claude, nor do they care. But they all know what ChatGPT is.
Maybe Im projecting my distaste for being psychologically manipulated, but I dont think users would continue using a genAI that embeds ads directly into the response when they can just switch to gemini where they only see banners.
https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/a253471f-8260-40c6-a2cc-aa93fe9f1...
Many people I know have started simply calling it "Chat".
"I had Chat help me write this" (I didn't, I promise)
They own "chat.com", I think OpenAI should pull the trigger and move to the shorter domain and finish the rebrand.
They ran a super bowl ad. It's all over the construction industry. Claude is still not quite the Kleenex that ChatGPT is, but there is a pretty good chance lay people have heard of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude by now.
To disagree with the person below/above me that ChatGPT is the word used generically, when someone uses Gemini or Claude or Copilot, they TELL you which one they used, because they are essentially saying "i didnt use ChatGPT by choice."
Gemini is the one most likely to be used without people knowing which one they used.
e.g. "I put it in chatgtp and..." when they actual asked Gemini.
Still everyone knows what I'm talking about.
The people in real life who say ChatGBT or similar are either so out of the loop the technology doesn't even matter to them, or simply are just stupid.
There is no way a person who can't get "GPT" right is even worth listening to.
ChatGPT is too awkward to do that with.
Their marketing has been working the high end of the “regular people” market for a good while.
There's no better way to create awareness of a brand than to get it featured in the most popular reality TV show globally at the moment: "Thing Trump Did: Season 2."
[1] Proof: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=... (see the massive spike in January of this year)
GPT-5.5 is a bit more expensive than Opus ? Current list prices
| Model | Input | Output |
| GPT-5.5 | $5/MTok | $30/MTok |
| Opus 4.8/7 | $5/MTok | $25/MTok |
Everything else is subjective to your setup, use case, configuration tuning and so forth.
More importantly bean-counters and decision makers at even 150+ seat orgs are looking at pricing sheets and enterprise contracts not how it performs for some team in a specific harness today to make million dollar annual contracts. It is not common for procurement teams to do commission the level of detailed analysis or large scale pilots that will actually hold for the duration of contract.
That doesn't mean that GPT-5.5 is selling less than Claude at all, just that cost is not the primary driver if list price is not cheaper, there is reason these are published in the same format by every vendor, because the common metric is how finance likes to compare with.
Per-token pricing is totally sensible from the provider-perspective on mapping COGS to revenue, but for a consumer, different models will produce more or less tokens, meaning the cost calculation is multi-dimensional.
Input/Cache/Output ratios are use case and configuration dependent . Any benefits in one model can usually be roughly to another with configuration tuning, and discussions devolve into subjective experience.
Pricing sheet is the objective way to compare cost.
Considering that their models are de facto extremely close in performance you would think that these arguments would've held, but they clearly don't.
I don't like Altman and I am still upset about his memory deal last year but he prepared for the current shortages months before anybody else. Meanwhile, Anthropic seems to lack any plans besides third party contracting. IMHO they got very lucky with xAI and Google having spare capacity and willing to rent it. But what about next year?
* NVidia GPU, Google TPU, Apple SoC, etc.
A short half-life means you are going to quickly dispose of what you have now, anyway. In fact most current datacenters can't even handle Vera Rubin, so I don't think there's short term risk here.
Nvidia has probably monopolized several upstream supplies to manufacture critical chip components for next 2 years, the HBMs and Optics component from LITE, as well as TSM capacity. Let alone those power components they funded themselves.
Let's say you have a genius design, but you will have it close to impossible to compete with Nvidia in getting it to volumes.
Jensen is a player, he isn't fooling around with all these Asian trips just to wine and dine
Everyone has critical risk on multiple parts of the supply chain. GPUs and Memory are just things OAI mitigated for.
Power - Bigger bottleneck than GPU or RAM perhaps, New Grid connected capacity is typically 10+ year timescale with lot of regulatory friction. Captive capacity is also quite constrained - now Gas turbines have 7+ year wait time.
There are plenty of hard constraints that OAI cannot easily solve either.
It is not clear that running one's own datacenter is a competitive advantage. Why do you think OpenAI can handle that?
Anthropics relativ longterm contract with xAI def shows that they can fill the capacity vs Musk not. OpenAI and Anthropic are both using a lot of capacity so its fair to say that this is an advantage.
If they stay very close competitive (which they are), your own datacenter does reduce token price.
I mean, this is a bit like complaining that McDonalds doesn't have their own herds of cows. OpenAI actually isn't in the business of buying GPUs or running data centres, and it's pretty weird to think that's an advantage (though it comes up constantly on here, as Anthropic keeps eating OpenAI's lunch).
There are many suppliers that are desperate to fight for Anthropics business, and it has shown an agility to embrace whatever advances in the industry come along. Anthropic is now running across a million or so Google TPUv8s, for instance. If tomorrow someone else comes out with a better GPU/TPU, they can embrace it in a heartbeat.
All while OpenAI sits on their rapidly depreciating GPUs.
Or...actually they won't, because OpenAI doesn't take business advice from HN. The vast majority of OpenAI's compute is from Microsoft, Oracle and so on. They're smart enough to not become a big hardware purchaser when that isn't their business. The core claim of your comment simply isn't true at all, nor is that the direction OpenAI is moving.
He told me they are massively pulling back on the AI stuff.
Right now the lashback is about cost, because that's the most easily measured pain point.
Soon, we'll start seeing a deeper understanding of the quality issues. At that point, it's likely this whole experiment gets firmly put in a bin of the toolbox where it belongs.
Most people don't yet have mature enough setups to fully exploit that level of use.
Why? Have we figured out the limits of what agents can do?
> OpenAI is much less exposed to tokenmaxxing
I don't think this is true, from my own experience & chatting with my acquaintances.
If a task can be completed with 100k tokens but employees are considered better performers if they complete it with 500k tokens instead… that’s unsustainable and cannot possibly benefit Anthropic in the long term.
At some point, Amazon and Uber and so on and so forth are going to realize that actually, employees using 100k tokens or even 50k tokens is better than 500k and Anthropic’s revenue will fall off a cliff.
And I could be wrong about tokenmaxxing being a Claude specific problem but as far as I can tell, all of the major companies encouraging employees to maximize their token usage are Claude Code users. And the music has to stop on that at some point, whether because the companies run out of money or because they learn better ways of measuring productivity in the AI age. And if tokenmaxxing is what is driving Anthropic’s lead in revenue, it could be catastrophic to lose that, because Anthropic are spending billions of dollars per month on the infrastructure to support it.
If tokenmaxxing is evenly distributed between Anthropic and OpenAI then they’ll both hurt but equal hurt shouldn’t disadvantage either much.
I see most of the surge here comes FOMO AI spending which will have to be dialed down later half of the year, otherwise those companies will have to layoff to fund their AI bill, which is harmful to their business.
Anthropic grabs its bag at the peak, but feast is over.
I think Google has caught up enough to certainly be a player in the consumer ad driven market.
I also don't think only one foundation model adds up. Now that the trail is blazed a dozen companies can likely make a good enough model. The question is if there's a moat to make it winner take all
I don't think SOTA-wise Google has a lot of catch up to do.
Especially if you assume that 6 months ago they weren't very close to this version of profitable
They don't seem too far off to me.
Well functioning market is supposed to have many, as in a lot, companies with similar products. To create competition.
People have been going to Google for a quarter of a century, and I imagine they will continue to do so.
As far as I am concerned, I moved to DDG in 2013 and never looked back, but I find Google AI intriguing.
How the hell do you crush a ~1T company on the one thing they have all their focus on?
Both Anthropic and OpenAI only has access to whatever they can buy or steal.
And it's becoming increasingly hard to get fresh uncontaminated data for training. No amount of money can buy that.
Claude Code and Codex are a big advantage, vs Gemini CLI which might be killedbygoogle soon? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196867
> Both Anthropic and OpenAI only has access to whatever they can buy or steal. A trillion can buy you quite a lot! Like offer some company a ton of money for data, and if they say no simply buy said company. Bonus points if it's someone like Atlassian who's stock price is getting hammered largely because of you.
Me, not a SWE, I have never even tried Claude
(and I am not sure I prefer ChatGPT over Google)
And Saudi Aramco before they IPO'd
So you're assuming lots of risk and putting it all in the same basket.
There's no shame in getting 100k $ worth of stock, selling it and putting it on some vanguard fund and diversifying, in fact it's statistically the best move you can do.
Of course, you can be like those many googlers that did this and then regret in hindsight.
I suspect we'll have our first $10T company in the next 2-3 years. That's only doubling.
Investors are betting real money on a payout. It seems disingenuous to think that they’re all idiots.
Having been through an IPO before, it was good for employee liquidity, but bad for the culture and long-term success of the company.
The judgment is subjective though, so pushing the boundaries could be a calculated risk.
You're assuming private liquidity to be infinite and private credit (that fuels VCs) to always have favorable rates.
https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba...
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/tender_offer
https://carta.com/learn/equity/liquidity-events/tender-offer...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
(secondary markets are sometimes an option, depending on stock transfer restrictions)
FTX bought 8% of Anthropic for $500m in 2021.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/josipamajic/2026/03/18/ftx-owne...
The price was determined by a formula based on revenue and such, so I always knew what they were worth.
I was not allowed to sell to anyone else though.
I also imagine that venture funding rounds have a lower ceiling than the public markets - but at these rounds I'm not so sure!
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They cannot raise forever, SpaceX has done more rounds but the timing is most important.
I do care about: how useful their products are vs. cost and how secure are their businesses. Actually I only care about the first thing since these services are hot swap-able with some effort.
I did look into this briefly long ago for SpaceX. There are ways for relatively small investors (and I do mean relatively!) to get into some of these companies equity pre-exit by buying shares from employees who currently hold them for those who want to reduce risk/need the cash now vs. later.
You will likely need to have enough assets already with a single institution to have a private banking relationship with your bank. They would be the one to call to ask what options might be available. There are other options like EquityZen that make it more accessible, but I have not looked into those at all.
You will also need to be either an accredited investor or a qualified investor ($1M/$5M minimum networth not counting your personal property) depending on how each company is setup, but again I'm not entirely sure on details there.
I stopped looking into it when I was told that there was a $1M minimum buy-in at that time. More than I was looking to do at the time. I imagine it's much higher these days.
These are of course highly risk investments and I am unsure of how tested these structures are - so I imagine there is some counterparty risk on top of all the usual stuff.
Now, headlines are only about hundred of billions. I do not know what to think about that, apart from the fact that I wish that we were putting that money to enhance human lives in general. Of course, people will say that these tools will help humans in the future, but 1) at what costs, and 2) I would prefer, I don't know, bridges or infrastructure, or free healthcare, or food for everyone.
Until they IPO and the investors make their money, who knows what is behind the revenue stated
Databricks raised an L round last year, so they'll have to solve it first.
https://huggingface.co/Anthropic
models 0
None public yethttps://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/excel-specificati...
[0] - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/4888467/...
Hynix is participating with a new circular deal. Hynix is also valued at $1 trillion now, which is positively insane.
This scam will implode harder that the housing bubble.
They're the belle of the ball right now, everybody is talking about them, everybody wants to invest in them, so they can call the shots.
Then they'll have money in the bank for a long time no matter what happens – IPO, market downturn, etc.
Takes off lots of pressure so they can continue focusing on the product.
I feel AI is a bit different, as in there is a spectrum ranging from “utterly stupid” (early ChatGPT), “very helpful” (kinda now), “SkyNet 2.0” (what good are humans!).
As algorithms and technology improve, AI will be both cheaper and more capable. Companies like Anthrophic wouldn’t be the vaulted celebrities as they are today. At that point, I’m not sure what value much of society can provide…
At one time, blacksmiths had a valued place in general society. Today, not so much…
/s