All of big tech (except Google obviously) is pushing hard for Claude Code internally. I’m talking “you all have unlimited tokens and we’re going to have a leaderboard of who used the most” kind of push.
"we’re going to have a leaderboard of who used the most"
Yeah I've seen stuff like that and it's a bit bewildering for me. Feels a bit like AWS is new and we're competing to see who can deploy the most EC2 instances.
It’s the crudeness of available management methods at play. Quite exposing for the profession, really (remember lines of code as measure of productivity?).
Their disclosed run rate was 14bn around the time of those filings IIRC, they started showing meaningful revenue around start of 2025, so if you just linearly extrapolate up that would give you ~7bn-ish actual revenue over that period. The more the growth is weighted towards the last few months the more that number goes down
So I don't think those numbers are really in tension at all
If your revenue doubles every month, then in the first month where you make $2.5B, your total lifetime revenue has been $5B ($2.5B this month, $1.25B the month before, etc. is a simple geometric series). But your current revenue run rate for the next year will be $2.5B x 12 = $30B.
They're not quite growing that fast, but there's nothing inherently inconsistent between these claims... as long as the growth curve is crazy.
1) It's in their interest to distort numbers and frame things that make them look good - e.g. using 'run-rate'
2) The numbers are not audited and we have no idea re. the manner in which they are recognising revenue - this can affect the true compounding rate of growth in revenues
The numbers are certainly audited by their investors. Anthropic isn't foreign to PR talk, but investors know what to look for in their book. They aren't stupid unlike how they are viewed on HN.
There are more investment money than Anthropic need. They can pick and choose.
I do, and I do trust the numbers. I doubt Anthropic is pursuing fraud given that they already don't have enough compute to serve demand. What is the point of lying to the public, investors and risk going to jail?
I think you can argue that AI is going to explode and take over the economy, and it’s still a bubble.
I think one possible route is that cloud capacity just becomes totally commoditized and none of the hyperscalers will be able to extract the kinds of profit margins that would allow them to make a good return on their investment (model makers will fall victim to this too). Ultimately, what may happen is that market competition for everything explodes since AI and robots can do all the work, prices for everything (goods, services, assets) collapses, and no one is really any richer than anyone else.
Even if the AI frontier becomes "totally commoditized" it will still be reliant on a scarce factor, namely leading-edge chips. Chipmakers will ultimately capture that value, because competing it away would require expanding the industry and that's a very slow process involving billion-dollar expenses planned far in advance (multiple years, and that lead time can only expand further as the required scale gets even larger).
AI being a bubble it's not mutually exclusive of being a real and useful technology and the existence of non-snake oil companies.
Cisco was a bubble in the dot com crash, despite being a company that provide real value and profit, just not at the level of the crazy expectations from the time.
I’m not sure your numbers are accurate, they raised $13bn in funding in September last year. Also do note that a lot of the money is cross-subsidized by Google who is funding the TPUs as an investment, so I wouldn’t be so confident that they are returning money quite yet (though it does seem that Anthropic might make it).
They won’t. They’ll just casually fade away from prior statements. Just like all the software engineers whose first take was that it’s just autocomplete.
All of big tech (except Google obviously) is pushing hard for Claude Code internally. I’m talking “you all have unlimited tokens and we’re going to have a leaderboard of who used the most” kind of push.
"we’re going to have a leaderboard of who used the most"
Yeah I've seen stuff like that and it's a bit bewildering for me. Feels a bit like AWS is new and we're competing to see who can deploy the most EC2 instances.
It’s the crudeness of available management methods at play. Quite exposing for the profession, really (remember lines of code as measure of productivity?).
Also, very very recently they said in a court filing that their lifetime revenue was "at least" 5 billion. Which is it?
Their disclosed run rate was 14bn around the time of those filings IIRC, they started showing meaningful revenue around start of 2025, so if you just linearly extrapolate up that would give you ~7bn-ish actual revenue over that period. The more the growth is weighted towards the last few months the more that number goes down
So I don't think those numbers are really in tension at all
If your revenue doubles every month, then in the first month where you make $2.5B, your total lifetime revenue has been $5B ($2.5B this month, $1.25B the month before, etc. is a simple geometric series). But your current revenue run rate for the next year will be $2.5B x 12 = $30B.
They're not quite growing that fast, but there's nothing inherently inconsistent between these claims... as long as the growth curve is crazy.
The reality is
1) It's in their interest to distort numbers and frame things that make them look good - e.g. using 'run-rate' 2) The numbers are not audited and we have no idea re. the manner in which they are recognising revenue - this can affect the true compounding rate of growth in revenues
The numbers are certainly audited by their investors. Anthropic isn't foreign to PR talk, but investors know what to look for in their book. They aren't stupid unlike how they are viewed on HN.
There are more investment money than Anthropic need. They can pick and choose.
"The numbers are certainly audited by their investors."
Hahaha.
Mate nobody cares about that nor trusts it. Everyone is waiting in anticipation for the S-1 filing.
I do, and I do trust the numbers. I doubt Anthropic is pursuing fraud given that they already don't have enough compute to serve demand. What is the point of lying to the public, investors and risk going to jail?
Money? Bankman-Fried wasn't the only one.
Curious - what’s this court filing?
Too lazy to pull up a url, but it was a filing by Anthropic's CFO in the Anthropic v Department of War case.
Doesn't that beat openai in revenue?
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But But But "AI is a bubble!!!!!!"
At what point would bubble-callers admit that they were completely wrong?
I think you can argue that AI is going to explode and take over the economy, and it’s still a bubble.
I think one possible route is that cloud capacity just becomes totally commoditized and none of the hyperscalers will be able to extract the kinds of profit margins that would allow them to make a good return on their investment (model makers will fall victim to this too). Ultimately, what may happen is that market competition for everything explodes since AI and robots can do all the work, prices for everything (goods, services, assets) collapses, and no one is really any richer than anyone else.
Even if the AI frontier becomes "totally commoditized" it will still be reliant on a scarce factor, namely leading-edge chips. Chipmakers will ultimately capture that value, because competing it away would require expanding the industry and that's a very slow process involving billion-dollar expenses planned far in advance (multiple years, and that lead time can only expand further as the required scale gets even larger).
You don’t think open AI models will eventually be able to design and build chips and fabs and all their components?
Except you're neglecting the fact that LLMs can become more efficient.
The magical thing about software is that efficiency gains can come pretty quickly relative to other industries.
We're already seeing this with Qwen 3.5 and Gemma 4. They're better than GPT-3.5 and they run on smartphones and old laptops.
AI being a bubble it's not mutually exclusive of being a real and useful technology and the existence of non-snake oil companies.
Cisco was a bubble in the dot com crash, despite being a company that provide real value and profit, just not at the level of the crazy expectations from the time.
I'm literally talking about the fact that Anthropic is making $30B Annual Revenue, which is the result of less than $10B investment two years ago.
The public hasn't seen the insane ROA/ROI on GPUs. So all AI adjacent stocks are massively undervalued.
I’m not sure your numbers are accurate, they raised $13bn in funding in September last year. Also do note that a lot of the money is cross-subsidized by Google who is funding the TPUs as an investment, so I wouldn’t be so confident that they are returning money quite yet (though it does seem that Anthropic might make it).
They won’t. They’ll just casually fade away from prior statements. Just like all the software engineers whose first take was that it’s just autocomplete.