Everything comes back to whether the demand is really there.
Anthropic thinks it is. The got the demand / datacenter match right in Q2, got great margins, and committed hard.
They've got:
- $114b committed to Google
- $110b committed to AWS
- $161b committed to Broadcom
- $120b committed to SpaceX
If the party continues, they'll go from $50b in revenue to $500b and be fine.
But if they don't, it's going to hurt. And that's their only choice, because otherwise, they end up with a frontier model and 50% of the capacity and get eviscerated on either availability or last-minute datacenter leases.
It's a big business, but it's not an easy business.
jacquesm 49 minutes ago [-]
Meanwhile the Chinese are going to undercut them every chance they get.
Today's prices are the ceiling. But AI capability is getting less of a scarce resource with every passing day and it would be a big mistake to plan that your current margins are going to be your future margins as well. Long terms AI will converge on energy costs + capex write-off + margin and the latter will be a race to the bottom.
sheepscreek 2 minutes ago [-]
I think you’re right - it’ll be interesting to see how the behemoths navigate when new and cheaper memory manufacturing capacity comes online. Currently predicted to happen starting 2028. That is where most of the current hardware costs are concentrated.
On that front, I think DeepSeek is a dark horse. They are really odd - not chasing revenue, care more about unit profitability, are obsessed with driving down costs (like Elon back in the day). As the founder says, they are content with where they are, being the model that does 80% for a fraction of the cost.
I mention them because they are playing a different game and might be able to out-innovate everyone else.
simias 39 minutes ago [-]
The problem for me is that it's really hard to project what this industry is going to look like 6 months from now, let alone 6 years.
What's the endgame once the dust settles? Is it going to be a utility like water or electricity and the cheapest offer will prevail, in which case margins will be crushed? Or is Anthropic (or some other big AI lab) going to swallow everything and become the Google Search of LLMs, with everybody else fighting for scraps?
Or is it local compute, models becoming more efficient and hardware becoming cheaper (again) and companies hosting their own AI clusters like they would run SAP?
I think there is a plausible path where this valuation actually works out, but it's a narrow one IMO. I also want to acknowledge that I personally would prefer if it wasn't the case and a more distributed, open model prevailed.
jacquesm 35 minutes ago [-]
I just look at technology over the last 50 years and see: decreasing prices, increasing capabilities. Barring temporary hiccups. Altman & co did a very smart thing by locking up the GPUs and the RAM, they effectively created a temporary near monopoly. At the same time: that incentivized the rest of the world to look more closely at efficiency negating some of the gains of that expense.
It's just like a utility with the slight difference that it can be sold at a distance without significant cost for transportation, in many ways it is the ultimate digital good. Unlike Spotify copyright is not an issue, unlike your electricity, gas, internet or water company there is no last mile problem. Unlike Google there are a ton of qualified contenders already (Google had to be better than Altavista, which wasn't hard, but they were so much better they managed to lock up search for long enough to cement their position).
Anthropic has none of the advantages and all of the disadvantages. On top of that all AI companies seem to be run by megalomaniacs.
skippyboxedhero 20 minutes ago [-]
The long-term is considerably easier because in the short-term there are limits on supply so prices aren't really able to move in a way where balance will be found.
In the long-term, the marginal cost of a request is zero so prices will plunge and a lot of the fixed investment will get stuck. The difference between the cost of training a model/infra and serving a request from that model is a clear problem for economics.
What happens with Anthropic specifically is less clear because they, as every company in the same position in the last 150 years has done, are going to push for regulation. A lot of the risk has also been shifted onto neoclouds. The value of the customer relationship is, however, effectively zero. A core part of their strategy has been to build stuff out like CC to differentiate that but, ultimately, that won't work.
The other strategy they have employed is trying to get other companies to stop training new models. Again, seems unlikely to work.
There is no scenario in which they become Google search outside of government intervention. Obviously this is a key part of their strategy now but at best, this will only work in the US and Europe (I would actually say they are much further along in Europe where there is a strong tendency towards corporatism and centralisation of power, they could be "Europe's AI").
jacquesm 15 minutes ago [-]
The only thing regulatory capture in the USA will do is to improve the situation for the rest of the world to compete. I wonder how long it will take them to figure that one out, for all their smarts they seem to be incapable of reading a history book.
rayiner 34 minutes ago [-]
The evidence we have so far points to LLMs becoming commodities. I can’t think of a technology in the last 30 years where so many companies are within ankle biting distance of the leader. There seems to be no data aggregation moat like with Google.
koolba 24 minutes ago [-]
The interface being arbitrary text makes the moat even looser. The cost of experimentation with alternatives is getting lower and lower.
It’s going to be hard for companies to justify paying $1000s per month to frontier providers when they see what’s doable with open versions.
realusername 4 minutes ago [-]
I don't see a path forward for valuations like Anthropic, either the hardware requirements fall off a cliff (and why would people pay Anthropic so much if it runs on a cheap laptop?) or either they don't and they will never have the capabilities to serve all their customers (and why would they be valued so much then?).
It's a lose/lose situation here for Anthropic (and OpenAI) whatever happens.
oddIdentities 28 minutes ago [-]
>Is it going to be a utility like water or electricity and the cheapest offer will prevail
This
petcat 44 minutes ago [-]
The Chinese labs are not providing their open-weight models for free because they think it is good for humanity. They are doing it because they are severely chip constrained due to the Nvidia and ASML embargos and all available GPUs have to go toward training with very little left for inference [1]. So they are giving their models away for US and EU hosts to serve inference in order to still have a presence in the market.
It's not a great position to be in and it will still take a long time for the compute gap to close. In the meantime, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are essentially unchallenged.
I don't particularly care why they do it, they do it. OpenAI is less open than the Chinese.
ericmay 21 minutes ago [-]
You should. Maybe they have it open now just to destroy competition and then they close it. Now you have a closed system, with no alternatives.
Besides...
"If passed, the rules would require Chinese companies to obtain licenses to export the core technology behind their leading models.
They would also ban the export of A.I. that can be used to launch cyberattacks, as well as models trained on what China calls “core data.” The government broadly defines that as data that concerns national security, the welfare of Chinese citizens and the public interest. Experts say the scope includes data on the military or critical infrastructure, state secrets and other sensitive information. "
neither did google or any other american company did open source anything for the greater good
there is no point in this comment.
cdmckay 2 minutes ago [-]
I think the point is cope
ck2 37 minutes ago [-]
How long until China has its own chips?
It's a shame "AI" cannot be made to run on bitcoin mining dedicated hardware because they mastered that in only a few years
ac29 9 minutes ago [-]
> How long until China has its own chips?
There are dozens of Chinese domestic AI accelerators: Huawei, Alibaba, and Baidu all have chips, there are a bunch of smaller startups too. The chinese mainland is behind on leading edge fabrication though, SMIC only does ~7nm class since they don't have EUV.
jacquesm 34 minutes ago [-]
Unless you were sarcastic: it absolutely can. Try finding a 170 for a reasonable price.
That depends on whether "frontier" models can maintain an expanding frontier. If the frontier settles, they're dead, and it will be commoditized. Otherwise, there are still plenty of pathological behaviors of these things to address that will keep expanding that frontier (if that's possible and the limitation isn't the approach itself).
The reception of saying things like this is interesting. AI stans think I'm way too pessimistic but AI haters think I'm mindlessly optimistic.
kd913 24 minutes ago [-]
Even outside of the Chinese models, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta all of them are offering significantly more coherent and competitive internal models and reasonable price.
Why would I pick anthropic.
motbus3 25 minutes ago [-]
there is no point of saying 'the chinese'
everyone will do it because it was proven that any political frills might cause an attempt to damage your system.
I dont know when, but i think if you keep menacing of taking technology of people hands for any political reason will be a reason for people to not use it or to rely in a more reasonable party.
mv4 23 minutes ago [-]
I don't think today's prices are the ceiling, considering they are subsidized. Once businesses have grown dependent on AI (and their institutional knowledge is lost), they will pay much more just to stay afloat.
margalabargala 15 minutes ago [-]
Open models by other providers are not subsidized, and anyone can spin up a competitor. That's the price ceiling.
jononor 31 minutes ago [-]
Cloud compute has managed to have pretty good margins. That seems like a really similar business model to what Anthropic is doing - inferene+value-adds as-a-service. Why wouldn't they also be able to get cloud level margins or a bit higher?
WarmWash 6 minutes ago [-]
Lots of people seem to have pretty short memories (or are too young to have seen it), but the flight from "local service" to "cloud service" was intense.
Companies don't mind paying extra to have a another company that does nothing but said thing do said thing for them. It even actually often ends up being cheaper/more profitable.
jkubicek 23 minutes ago [-]
I don't think AI will be able to sustain cloud compute-size margins. Inference is a commodity and value-adds can't be sold for anything. Why pay for an advanced harness when you can just ask the model to build one for you?
forshaper 1 minutes ago [-]
Observing SaaS vs using an open source stack in the beforetimes, the answer might be some combination of, "So I never have to think about it, and if anything goes wrong, no one can blame us because we went with the biggest & most trusted provider."
boringg 39 minutes ago [-]
100% value fallacy right there.
Point is taken - competition is fierce and will be biting everyone's ankles.
numlock86 38 minutes ago [-]
> Meanwhile the Chinese are going to undercut them every chance they get.
I wish they were, but I always wonder when people chime in with Chinese models what they are actually doing with those. I have an OpenRouter account and give various models a shot every other month, wishing for an alternative, but I always come back to Claude. Even more so since the switch from Opus 5.1 to 5.5. To me, personally, it's unmatched. Like a year ago it was very different, and I would use other models all the time. But honestly at the time they all felt kind of "meh" still. I just hope everyone is at a good baseline in a year from now on, so I actually have a choice. And then, as you stated, things will get interesting.
tl;dr: I agree
Sphax 25 minutes ago [-]
I use Opus 5.5 daily at work and a mix of GLM 5.3 (Flash or not), Deepseek v4 (flash or pro) at home and while Opus 5.5 is more capable, in my opinion it matters for less than 5% of the work i do.
These chinese models are simply good enough for the vast majority of tasks I run and when they're not I use Astra or Opus 5.5.
Yes, leaving Opus 5.5 on all the time is comfortable when you pay the 90€ plan but it's just not necessary.
criley2 13 minutes ago [-]
I use Opus 5.5 at work and I use Sonnet 5.5 at home. Sonnet 5.5 medium according to AA cost per task is $0.48 per task, while GLM 5.3 (max) is $2.01 (opus 5.5 high is $1.82). GLM 5.3 flash is $0.28 per task and Deepseek 4.1 flash 1017 is $0.26.
So it seems like Sonnet 5.5 medium, GLM 5.3 flash and Deepseek V4.1 flash 1017 are all in a similar space in capacity and price, however the $20 anthropic sub will get you like $200-$300 in sonnet 5.5...
Another bonus is that sonnet uses a fraction of the overall tokens and finishes much faster than the average chinese model, so your work goes faster (Sonnet 5.5 medium in 2 minutes, Deepseek 1017 in 6.5 minutes, GLM 5.3 flash in 13 minutes...)
I still don't get why paying for chinese inference makes sense. I should try Haiku 5.5 high/max because it's posting higher numbers than Deepseek V4.1 flash for half the price
jacquesm 33 minutes ago [-]
> I always wonder when people chime in with Chinese models what they are actually doing with those
In my case: robotics, complex document analysis (typically 800K context).
motbus3 22 minutes ago [-]
i reduced my claude expenditure in 80% using other models.
Maxatar 37 minutes ago [-]
These commitments aren't annual though, most of them amount to 10 billion a year commitments for 10 years. Put another way Anthropic has committed 52 billion dollar a year to these companies and their S-1 indicates they earn 67.2B a year in revenue.
I'm not going to predict whether Anthropic succeeds or fails, just that it's very misleading to claim that Anthropic needs to grow to $500b in revenue without making it clear that it's $500B in revenue per decade rather than $500B in revenue per year which is what most people reading such a number would assume.
opus55_lover 43 minutes ago [-]
the market for their valuation is just not there imo. they need to significantly expand into non-coding products and outshine their coding offerings to make it work.
as in, if they capture every single professional software dev and extract $1000 from them every month, their yearly revenue will be like $500B. do your own back of the envelope on that with ongoing costs and consider how unrealistic a goal this actually is.
even worse, the very product they offer is self limiting. if it becomes so good as to actually replace software devs, they will have less customers to extract money from.
their valuation essentially relies on a small percentage of mega users having unheard of levels of spending.
the part about a small percentage giving them most of their money is already true (their rumored $100+ bil revenue as of mid 2026 already outshines all software devs having a $100 max subscription), but they are two orders of magnitude or so away in terms of the actual amounts to make it work.
sdthjbvuiiijbb 35 minutes ago [-]
>as in, if they capture every single professional software dev and extract $1000 from them every month, their yearly revenue will be like $500B. do your own back of the envelope on that with ongoing costs and consider how unrealistic a goal this actually is.
The market for Claude Code is much bigger than professional software devs. It's really anyone who uses a computer. I already know normal people who have been using it for personal software.
margalabargala 10 minutes ago [-]
Not really. Random non tech users won't pay $100/mo. Nor should they, most people will be served fine by whatever free thing MS bundles in Windows next year.
WarmWash 2 minutes ago [-]
You don't have to skip the plumber or the mechanic many times before $100 becomes a plainly obvious need.
It's not gonna install a shower for you, but it will confidently walk you through that leaky faucet. And I don't know if you have paid a pro recently, but they don't charge $20 for a 20 minute fix.
14 minutes ago [-]
logicallee 10 minutes ago [-]
>the market for their valuation is just not there imo
I tried to look for the valuation in the linked document, did you see it or any reference to a valuation elsewhere in anything published by Anthropic? what is "their valuation" that you refer to?
dofm 14 minutes ago [-]
The SpaceX thing interests me. They are basically paying SpaceX at a $10B per gigawatt equivalent rate right now, yeah? Because they only get 0.3GW for their $3B.
So what that means is that if the demand exists for any AI data centre, it's a solid business to run one — they cost maybe $50-60B to build out, they cost maybe $10B per year to run. You get your money back fast if the demand is there? And you can project being able to replace with better GPUs in the future without having to borrow for all of it.
But it is extremely difficult to believe that Anthropic is not projecting that all of its customers will ultimately use their service to the extent that their outlier customers do right now. They probably won't be projecting that their customers will find the need or ways to use them less.
And also, "no customer is more than 10% of our revenue" means that one customer is. If that customer is Microsoft (can it be? I honestly don't know) then things get tricky, because Microsoft clearly want an unmetered, on-device AI future.
stopsayingsorry 50 minutes ago [-]
>Anthropic thinks it is.
Anthropic has no choice, just like you said. It's crush and burn right now or double down.
And they will keep doubling down, because stopping is simply not an option.
JumpCrisscross 34 minutes ago [-]
> they will keep doubling down, because stopping is simply not an option
Of course it is. Apple is taking that strategic approach. If Anthropic believes it’s approaching saturation, pulling the plug when it’s at steady state and its rivals are over-invested is the winning move.
techpression 6 minutes ago [-]
Apple has a lot of actual money, Anthropic does not. Apple sells a lot of products, Anthropic doesn't. Apple have a platform multiple players want a piece of, Anthropic fight to stand alone.
There's very little comparison to be had here. Also, Anthropic likely have investors with way too much leverage for them to stop.
ieeje 47 minutes ago [-]
Exactly.
That’s why they hire ‘for the misson’. They have to pull off something magical to make all this work financially or they go bust.
paxy 33 minutes ago [-]
If you owe the bank a million dollars you have a problem. If you owe the bank a billion dollars the bank has a problem.
The same logic applies here.
Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Broadcom, Nvidia, SpaceX and others are spending hundreds of billions a year each on fast-depreciating infrastructure to serve this potential AI demand. If the demand never materializes then they know they are in big trouble. So they have every incentive in the world to prop up Anthropic (and OpenAI) and keep the party going.
Can they keep the bubble inflated indefinitely? Probably not, but all these companies combined have heck of a lot more influence than Anthropic alone.
bretpiatt 11 minutes ago [-]
They aren't "fast-depreciating infrastructure" -- research shared by a16z team, rental rates are up across the board, even for GPUs that are 5+ years old. The demand is real right now. The proverbial tide could go out but we aren't seeing it yet.
Most of the gap opened up after April, when token demand took off"
bunderbunder 24 minutes ago [-]
I have a hard time believing they are likely to get to $500bn in revenue. That’s another $450bn in revenue growth that needs to happen before demand tapers off.
But I see every reason to believe demand will taper off. It seems it’s already happening. Enterprises have been deciding that maybe corporate chatbot and coding agent budgets shouldn’t actually be infinite. AI startups are starting to successfully outcompete each other, effectively killing off members of Anthropic’s customer pool in the process. And consumer demand for AI products seems to be dropping. None of these are signs that suggest that Anthropic has thus far met only 10% of plausible long-term demand.
bretpiatt 5 minutes ago [-]
Total global wages ~$12 trillion/year. The "what you have to believe" here is that AI tool spend becomes at least 10-20% of it, my belief here is we see net slowdown in hiring as human + AI = super productivity so as businesses grow we'll continue to see increase in AI spending.
Then if inference does grow to a $2-3 trillion/year market that Anthropic is a big winner, as big as NVDA is now (they're going to be over $500 billion in revenue in calendar year 2027).
mv4 22 minutes ago [-]
We will see more (and bigger) "circular economy" deals.
JumpCrisscross 46 minutes ago [-]
> Everything comes back to whether the demand is really there
And unit economics.
HY1 2026 revenue less compute and infrastructure turned positive (45% gross compute margin; $8.9bn C&I to turn $16bn revenue) for the first time; it was -176% in FY 2025 with $7.3bn C&I on $4.6bn revenue.
It looks like a lot of costs of revenue are in sales, marketing and partnerships, though. Backing those out shows H1 2026 margin at 26% ($4.2bn) after -72% for FY 2025. Still positive.
ieeje 48 minutes ago [-]
Now ask yourself what it takes to generate 500bn…
You people are nuts. The failure risk is off the charts.
Maxatar 35 minutes ago [-]
The OP post is misleading because it makes you think Anthropic has to earn 500bn per year in revenue, but those commitments listed are not yearly commitments, they're commitments over 10 years with contracts that run until 2036.
Anthropic needs to earn 52B a year in annual revenue to honor those specific commitments plus obviously its own operating expenses... and yeah that will require Anthropic to grow as a company, but their S-1 indicates 67.2B a year in revenue and sure maybe they stop growing and this is their peak... or maybe they do manage to grow further to 80B a year, 90B a year...
blahblaher 23 minutes ago [-]
are those 67.2B revenue or profit? Because you know there are costs associated with running the business, so of those 67B if they only keep 30, they they're in the red, no?
ieeje 33 minutes ago [-]
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origini 44 minutes ago [-]
People are only nuts if they actually take money they don't have to invest in random companies.
But lets be clear: the growth of Anthropics revenue is very fast and way too many people stll don't even use AI
sekai 17 minutes ago [-]
> But lets be clear: the growth of Anthropics revenue is very fast and way too many people stll don't even use AI
Anthropic is selling $3 for $1, of course the growth is fast.
jazzypants 10 minutes ago [-]
I don't know a single person who hasn't used AI.
metrix 36 minutes ago [-]
Completely agree, but I don't see how much _value_ these new users will get out of it..
Businesses are extracting value now - for the average user I see it as a convenience that they will pick the cheapest provider for..
It's a race to the bottom for most as there's not a major differentiator.
ieeje 38 minutes ago [-]
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boringg 40 minutes ago [-]
For kicks - lets take the optimistic side here (because the whole thread will be reading pessimistic). What if they are under built and this growth continues to go parabolic. We then still have supply constraints and pent up demand for frontier model and you have a company thats currently at 1-1.5 T and levels up to 4-5 T.
I'm not saying I think thats what is going to happen, but it really isn't a stretch to think that this keeps running given that it hasn't really hit anywhere near as broad as we think it has (being HN community based).
wg0 49 minutes ago [-]
I do not understand 500 billion revenue? I mean how much is that in terms of tokens burned?
Maxatar 33 minutes ago [-]
It's a misleading number, the 500 billion in revenue is needed over a 10 year period, it's not a yearly figure. Anthropic isn't paying 500 billion a year for the commitments that OP posted, it's paying 500 billion between now and 2036.
ieeje 32 minutes ago [-]
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binarymax 44 minutes ago [-]
In the simplest calculation, if you get 200M people on a $200/mo pro max plan, that's $500B annual revenue.
This is a "utility" mindset. If you bet that Anthropic is just like a monthly electric bill, then it's within the realm of possibility.
For the record - I don't think that's gonna happen.
gwd 24 minutes ago [-]
FWIW I max out my pro max plan basically every week, not even using Fable any more. I think it's just a matter of people figuring out how to apply tokens effectively.
stymaar 34 minutes ago [-]
I don't think they are betting on that many people subscribing to their $200/mo plan, there's pretty much no upside in using a frontier model for the average consumer.
But on the flip side I don't think aiming for 1M businesses spending $40k a month in token in average is going to be more viable. And I'm not sure having 1000 corporations spending $40M a month is a option either.
techpression 4 minutes ago [-]
How many thousand more datacenters would that need, and what would be the ongoing (massive) cost of deprecating hardware in that world?
Zigurd 39 minutes ago [-]
This is the issue, for two reasons: Is there trillions of dollars of demand for LLMs, which is what it takes for Anthropic to make $500 billion in revenue? Is that demand going to be met by frontier cloud LLMs, or by open weight models run by the organizations using them (and cheaper cloud alternatives)?
ihsw 38 minutes ago [-]
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the__alchemist 12 minutes ago [-]
So, puts?
iLoveOncall 50 minutes ago [-]
> If the party continues, they'll go from $50b in revenue to $500b and be fine.
You really have to be insane to think that an AI company will ever reach $500B in revenue. That's almost the same as (2025) Amazon, Walmart, etc., companies with a MUCH wider market.
It is MORE than Apple, it's 5 times more than NVidia even. There is absolutely no software seller that is even remotely close to $500B in revenue.
Absolutely ridiculous.
ealready_value 13 minutes ago [-]
The thing to be remember about those companies you listed, none of them are software companies like Anthropic is.
* Amazon is a logistics company
* Walmart is a logistics and retail company
* Apple is a hardware company (that uses software to set their hardware apart)
* NVidia is a hardware company
The closest you get is Microsoft, at 281B in revenue. Some might argue Google/Alphabet, which is in the same area, but they sell Ads, not software.
Anthropic's expectations is that they will be able to fast-track their revenue generation to almost twice what Microsoft does today. In less than a few years.
throwawayffffas 45 minutes ago [-]
I think you are underestimating the market for AI. The better it gets the more the market expands.
The total amount spent on salaries in he US alone is over 12T dollars.
Assuming AI becomes ever more useful and is widely adopted 500B in revenue is not that crazy.
raesene9 34 minutes ago [-]
Let's posit that that's possible, for Anthropic to get to 500B in revenue, they'd either need 100% of the market or the market has to be even bigger.
OpenAI, Google, the many Chinese labs all have products and several of them likely have better financial positions. At the moment Anthropic have one of the best models but it needs to stay sufficiently above competition for them to capture a large share of the market.
At the same time this year we've seen a move for model diversification as cheaper models become "good enough". If this IPO was 6 months ago I think it might have gone better for them.
fluidcruft 36 minutes ago [-]
As I understand it, AI is only really getting traction in IT and software development. It's been mostly irrelevant elsewhere overall, all things considered. That could change, but basically there's only one product that is selling. Dunno whether there is $500b/year of IT and programming to replace.
surajrmal 14 minutes ago [-]
People are using it to do contract negotiation without a lawyer, argue with their doctors over health matters, complain to teachers about their methods, etc. On the flip side, lawyers are using it in supplement to paralegals, doctors transcribing patient notes with it, and teachers are using it to generate worksheets. It's being used fairly widely already
iLoveOncall 40 minutes ago [-]
Employers are reducing AI spending, not increasing it.
You're also assuming that basically the entirety of the market would go to Anthropic, rather than other providers, which makes no sense.
You are vastly over-estimating the market for AI. The extreme majority of people would never pay a dime for it.
josephg 41 minutes ago [-]
I’ve spent more money on Claude this year than I’ve given to a lot of other tech companies, combined. Well, I bought a new phone too - but amortised over the phone’s lifetime it’s still much cheaper than I’ve spent on my claude subscription and what I’ve gotten my company to pay in api usage credits.
There are two questions. Will the value keep scaling? And how much of that value chain will anthropic hold on to? Right now software development is being eaten alive by LLMs. Will that happen to other industries too? And in the long run, what do the models we run look like? Are people going to end up self hosing opensource models themselves, or are we going to collectively hitch our wagons to frontier models provided by anthropic and their competitors?
If ai keeps getting better - which I think it will - and if anthropic can corner a large part of the market in an enduring way - which seems less likely to me - then yes. I can easily imagine them becoming a huge company.
Zigurd 36 minutes ago [-]
Your usage and spending is an outlier in the current market. Anthropic's numbers are only plausible if you become typical of AI users.
r0b05 22 minutes ago [-]
You've spent that money at subsidized prices but would you spend 5x if subsidies stop?
xyhopguy 26 minutes ago [-]
Nvidia almost hit 100B in revenue last quarter.
rayiner 31 minutes ago [-]
That doesn’t seem ridiculous at all. Replacing clerical and knowledge workers is a vastly larger market than iPhones.
gortok 43 minutes ago [-]
I agree with you from our perspective it is ridiculous. I also agree that getting the consumer market to willingly pay for AI to the point where it sustains such an amount of revenue is not going to happen. (The knock on effects of folks using AI, and turning others off to AI because they used AI instead of writing emails themselves, for example).
But.
They may peak at 500B before this bubble bursts, simply because other major industry players are betting on AI as a means to get folks to believe in their own stock.
It’s belief all the way down, until you get to the point where “the market” starts asking where the return on investment is, and why they haven’t seen it yet. By that time, the investors have gotten their return and cashed out, and it’s the pension funds and the retail traders that are holding the bag.
And of course, at some point AI’s promise will be delivered in a form or fashion as yet unknown to us, but that is still years away, and until folks recognize that LLMs as they exist to day are not the path to that, they’ll continue to believe in this valuation.
boringg 35 minutes ago [-]
What feels ridiculous today might be the normal of tomorrow. Welcome to the new world.
What you are saying is the same thing that has been said about anyone trying to do anything massive and at scale. Can't be done - thats ridiculous - you are out of your mind.
jgalt212 29 minutes ago [-]
> If the party continues, they'll go from $50b in revenue to $500b and be fine.
Heads I win, tails we all lose. GFC Part II.
Noaidi 50 minutes ago [-]
> But if they don't, it's going to hurt.
They literally said revenue growth rate "may not be sustainable" and "may decrease".
So get ready for the hurt.
shawabawa3 49 minutes ago [-]
Literally every S1 is filled with these kinds of statements
gk1 34 minutes ago [-]
Those are just standard disclaimers.
cmiles8 35 minutes ago [-]
There are a lot of parallels to the WeWork S1. They’ve made absolutely massive forward cash commitments, on a business that’s increasingly commoditized, and with little hard evidence that they’ll generate the revenue (let alone the cashflow) to pay for all these future liabilities. All while everyone is discovering there isn’t really a secret sauce moat to demand much of a a premium over cheaper options that trade a few points above the direct COGS (cost of compute in this case).
If everything goes just perfect they might eek by. If it doesn’t this goes from high flying startup to insolvency and bankruptcy real fast.
reticulates 27 minutes ago [-]
when they start removing biscuits from the Anthropic offices, that’ll confirm their WeWork-like death spiral
kozikow 19 minutes ago [-]
"token factory" is indeed a terrible business model - no one is arguing that.
IMO the whole thing is based on the fact of "we will reach AGI/ASI eventually, and when we do, we will reach escape velocity".
No one knows - you, me, or Dario if this will happen and when.
levocardia 24 minutes ago [-]
So you'll be shorting the stock, I take it?
reticulates 16 minutes ago [-]
Shorting a company is not a trade against the future of a company, it is a trade against the market. You can know a company is going to zero and the company can go to zero and you can still lose your shirt from shorting it.
cmiles8 22 minutes ago [-]
A lot of people will, if this IPO actually happens. The price of CDS on bonds is already a strong market indication of where the market thinks all of this is heading.
rich_sasha 45 minutes ago [-]
One thing that bothers me is that if the AI maximalism turns out correct (which is needed to justify the valuations), why would AI companies respect money and ownership?
So far, even major disruptions were still affecting relatively small segments of the economy. Car lobby in Germany, tech in the US, "Big Pharma/Food/etc”. They needed the rest of the economy.
But if some AI company figures out a way to monopolize everything: new companies, old companies, physical manufacturing - all the things they say they will, please buy here for lots of money - why would they be bound to pay out dividends or otherwise share the fruits of their economic labour?
I’m not saying specifically Anthropic would be looking to screw its investors. Rather, if you control an almost omnipotent genie, wouldn’t the temptation just be too much?
Or temptation aside - will money even have any value? If some AI company rebuilds the economy from scratch, and control everything from accounting to shoe making, why would they respect the value of some fiat tokens? It’d be like the conquistadors respecting the shells and beads of their new Aztec subjects.
Of course, perhaps none of this happens, but then the question is, how good an investment all of this even is.
RemoteIsHeaven 13 minutes ago [-]
> why would they be bound to pay out dividends or otherwise share the fruits of their economic labour?
because they don't control the physical paper that is money.
I dont understand what you mean by "fiat tokens". I don't imagine most people will accept tokens as a currency because they are as good hold of value and predictable as bitcoin.
In a token economy, certainly what you say is a possibility, but as you can imagine, that economy will be unsustainable so back to "regular" money.
gnarlouse 7 minutes ago [-]
I mean there are a lot of paradoxes around AI. The chief two among which are:
1. the goal of ai is to end capitalism by disrupting scarcity in economics
2. if ai can build a closed system that prints ai factories, the 99% of humanity essentially are just genetic diversity live stock.
whoanoway 5 minutes ago [-]
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irthomasthomas 3 minutes ago [-]
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jialatsia 1 hours ago [-]
Ant generates $2.08 in revenue for every $1 spent on compute which is up from just $0.40 in Q1 2025.the payback period for compute is just insane, likely less than a year!
skerit 56 minutes ago [-]
I wonder how the "It's all heavily subsidized!" people are going to spin this.
deepwoods 31 minutes ago [-]
Subscriptions are heavily subsidized. 80% of their revenue comes from consumption-based pricing, which is not heavily subsidized (and probably not subsidized at all). The trouble is that this revenue is not especially reliable. If and when OpenAI gets the upper hand again, the consumption-based revenue could crater.
This may also be why OpenAI punted on their IPO: Anthropic has had the lead for most of 2026, so their consumption-based revenue is probably not looking pretty.
_aavaa_ 24 minutes ago [-]
> Subscriptions are heavily subsidized.
The only subsidization that matters is if they are selling the tokens for a loss.
Yes the $200 plan provides more than $200 of tokens, but that doesn't mean that it's losing money, either on average or on a case by case basis. The realistic alternative isn't that every $200-plan-user pays the full Api price, it's that they pay Anthropic $0.
JumpCrisscross 28 minutes ago [-]
> Subscriptions are heavily subsidized
Revenue less compute & infrastructure less sales, marketing & partnerships is positive!
kremi 46 minutes ago [-]
A podcast posted here recently had this number: 80% of ant revenue comes from just 8 customers. The consensus of the speakers was that if true, this would be indicative of a very vulnerable revenue structure. But this was based on leaks. Maybe we can have the real numbers now?
weieq2211 15 minutes ago [-]
And those 8 customers.. you think they will accept large price increases?
Hahahahahaha.
Those large customers are not a mom and pop store - they’re large market cap firms!!!
23 minutes ago [-]
whizzter 39 minutes ago [-]
I'm not really in that camp, but I'm still in the camp of "will they survive long-term if good enough open models trickles down to commodity hardware" (in a way the opposite camp perhaps?).
Sun made bank 25 years ago because their servers was needed for websites, today we run larger workloads on 5$ VPS servers (well maybe the VPS servers has gotten more expensive due to HW shortages but they're not intrinsically expensive anymore).
iLoveOncall 53 minutes ago [-]
Revenue is not profit?
xienze 38 minutes ago [-]
It's very simple, if you just assume they never have to spend money on training ever again, they're wildly profitable.
iLoveOncall 31 minutes ago [-]
Compute is by far not the only cost associated with running a service, so, no?
xienze 27 minutes ago [-]
Being sarcastic here. The usual argument everyone brings up "inference is extremely profitable, checkmate AI skeptics!" while dismissing the black hole that is training.
tester756 51 minutes ago [-]
Profit is not relevant
weieq2211 17 minutes ago [-]
Unfortunately for you - youre the pleb here.
If you’re not generating enough revenue to cover ALL expenditures - you are in effect subsidising as you should raise prices.
Why haven’t they? It would harm their business.
trollbridge 54 minutes ago [-]
They’ll just keep saying it is. That’s what they’ve done so far with DS
gizmodo59 54 minutes ago [-]
my thesis is that it will go down and not up over time. The moat they had in coding which is by far the highest token consumption is not that huge compared to Nov-Feb period where token maxxing was prevalent and no other vendor's model was that good.
SyneRyder 54 minutes ago [-]
Less than a year would also match what DeepSeek was reporting, where compute pays off in just 10 months. I think they also said they had an 80% margin on inference.
anilakar 57 minutes ago [-]
When will generic AI compute capability trickle down to us plebeians?
pachouli-please 52 minutes ago [-]
In the open weights scene, it is always chasing closely behind. Many leading edge big open models are trained in-part with distillation of large commercial hosted models.
jacquesm 52 minutes ago [-]
It already has. If you have a gaming GPU you can run AI locally.
snek_case 49 minutes ago [-]
At this point though gaming GPUs are not exactly affordable. You need a 32GB GPU to be able to run something genuinely useful for coding, and that's thousands of dollars. Still, happy to see open models make lots of progress. I just hope hardware prices come back to earth.
ndriscoll 29 minutes ago [-]
If you had been paying any attention at all over the last year, there were 32GB AMD cards at like $1200-1400 and Intel at a little over $1000. I actually hadn't yet noticed they've gone up in price and had last checked only a couple months ago. But even at like $2000, that's still comparable to the nominal price of a mid 90s consumer PC for actual magic.
jacquesm 19 minutes ago [-]
> for actual magic
Precisely. It is cheap at almost any price.
Zambyte 42 minutes ago [-]
24 GB 7900 XTX user here. You can do a ton with less than 32 GB. It definitely drops off quick, but 32 GB is not the floor for useful AI.
Risse 8 minutes ago [-]
24 GB 3090 user here. What is the best model for coding you have used? Qwen3.8 27B?
jacquesm 37 minutes ago [-]
Realistically I think 16GB is the lower limit and you can find those cheap enough still. Then you run llama.cpp to bond your cards and it's off to the races.
geerlingguy 21 minutes ago [-]
Scrappy builds aren't "affordable" but are more so than running Nvidia + optimized builds. You could put together a machine for $5000 or less that competes with frontier models from less than a year ago, albeit a little slower.
And cards like the $1600 (sheesh) R9700 have actually gotten more capable through community efforts at optimization, since their launch.
I think if the bubble can ever deflate/pop, and GPUs and RAM back off a bit, we'll see the dam burst for local AI.
Right now it's only accessible to people who can justify the costs.
krona 30 minutes ago [-]
yeah i trained a 1000 param LLM in my browser literally yesterday. it's game over for Anthropic /s.
xxpor 45 minutes ago [-]
Seems like that would imply you should be getting people to adopt now now still even if it costs a stupid amount, if you think it's valuable, rather than limiting token budgets. It'll only get cheaper over time.
crostlybostly 42 minutes ago [-]
Impressive, but probably based on depreciation servers over 5 years. But is that realistic? I wonder how many people are still using 5 year old servers in their AI training or inference.
_hmj 50 minutes ago [-]
ANT stock valuations might be high at listing, but it will be a good stock to add on declines. Great numbers!
jbs789 53 minutes ago [-]
Does that include R&D?
Over time that margin persists only if they maintain their competitive edge, which is not free.
wongarsu 39 minutes ago [-]
It includes compute and infrastructure for R&D. Then you have to add just over a third of their compute spend for personnel, another expense of that size for sales and marketing, and half that for other admin/ops costs, for an operating loss of 693M. Then a bunch of accounting stuff to end up losing 80B
I'm not sure I'd call it a great result, but it's a promising one. If they can increase demand without significant changes in margin or R&D spending, they are on the path to becoming very profitable
throwawayffffas 51 minutes ago [-]
The way I read it, it does. It looks like total revenue vs total compute expenditure.
throwawayffffas 52 minutes ago [-]
Just renting them out as hardware is close to 12 months.
WithinReason 51 minutes ago [-]
Including training?
hit8run 45 minutes ago [-]
That's their API cost price. No one will pay this on that scale? People are using tokens via their Max Plans?
camdenreslink 11 minutes ago [-]
Enterprise pays the API cost price
Noaidi 55 minutes ago [-]
Why are you ignoring the $80.7 Billion loss?
$72 billion of this $80.7 billion loss consists of non-cash accounting charges— related to convertible debt—triggered by a surge in the company’s valuation.
The hardware related liabilities are staggering.
AI psychosis is real.
npilk 50 minutes ago [-]
That's sort of a paper loss though. E.g. they made an agreement to give X% of stock for something, and now the stock has gone up a ton, so that X% of stock is worth a lot more than when they made the agreement. For accounting reasons this gets parsed as a loss. But they're still "paying" that same X% of stock, so it's not cash out the door.
Maybe not great, but a good problem to have if it means your stock is skyrocketing.
jfrbfbreudh 48 minutes ago [-]
> $72 billion of this $80.7 billion loss consists of non-cash accounting charges— related to convertible debt—triggered by a surge in the company’s valuation.
Explain what you think this means.
Noaidi 40 minutes ago [-]
It means that $72 billion will further dilute the stock price when the debt turns into stock.
It is pump and dump in action.
28 minutes ago [-]
sigmar 38 minutes ago [-]
I don't think you understand what you quoted. The reason for that loss is because their valuation skyrocketed. If I promise you 1% of my million dollar house, and then the price of my house grows 100x. On paper, I now owe you .99 million more dollars than I owed you before, but that doesn't mean I lost cash.
hawkice 51 minutes ago [-]
This is not what "AI psychosis" colloquially refers to. Few people have any firm opinions about the nature of cost accounting on LLM products.
Noaidi 49 minutes ago [-]
They are getting high off their own supply.
kikdij 36 minutes ago [-]
For those who are not familiar with S-1: this document is incredibly important. this is one of the rare times in the life of a company where it's not allowed, by law, to lie, nor to omit the truth.
sensanaty 3 minutes ago [-]
Technically true, but they're still fudging their numbers a bit even in the S-1, such as using "adjusted" operating margins to the tune of 10% when their GAAP (which they truly cannot lie about without ending up in deep shit (in theory anyways, I'm doubtful that they couldn't get away with it if they tried with the current administration)) is actually at negative -4%.
reticulates 22 minutes ago [-]
At the same time, an S-1 does not necessarily represent how the company thinks. Risk factors often get reported as “x thinks that y will happen” but the company is actually just describing things they have an obligation to describe, they’re not the risks they’re worried about internally.
Also this is being released under Trump’s SEC, who knows whether being caught lying in an S-1 matters any more.
decisionSniper 19 minutes ago [-]
ehh, search "GAAP" and see where they deviate from standard accounting measures. There's plenty of spin in here.
portly 26 minutes ago [-]
Nothing is respected by this criminal company.
afavour 23 minutes ago [-]
Feels like being asked to invest in IBM just as other manufacturers started releasing the first PC compatible machines.
Immediate term Anthropic, OpenAI rule the roost. But this is a very new technology and open models are already looking good. They’ll only get better. Is it realistic to think Anthropic will stay ahead of them enough to justify the valuation they’re asking for?
tecleandor 1 hours ago [-]
From the "Risk factors" section:
> If the use of our AI models results in harm, whether through use by malicious actors or misuse by other third parties, or if our model guardrails or safeguards fail to prevent such misuse, our reputation and brand, business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
That shouldn't be an 'if'.
Then, two paragraphs later...
> For example, in September 2025, we detected and assessed with high confidence that a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group manipulated our Claude Code tool into attempting infiltration into roughly 30 global targets...
But they should mention when the calls com from inside the house. :D
Interesting to review all the mentions to China and Taiwan too.
> The majority of the world’s most advanced chip manufacturing capacity is concentrated in Taiwan, primarily at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company [...] potential disruption from geopolitical tensions between Taiwan and China [...] Efforts to establish sufficient advanced chip manufacturing capacity outside of Taiwan, including in the United States, remain in early stages...
master_crab 45 minutes ago [-]
The thing the surprises me is that from a legal perspective, (NAL) it sounds like it makes sense not to host the LLMs. Merely to license them to others. Then it becomes a dual use tool like any other and their culpability drops.
For example, the huggingface hack is absolutely OpenAIs responsibility and they should be sued to the hilt. But if someone else uses a self or third party hosted anthropic model, they can escape liability (mostly?)
Same as with the argument over trucks, knives, and any other dual use item is used as weapons. you don’t blame the manufacturer.
(I am merely pontificating here. The law and precedent is nowhere near caught up on this)
deepwoods 15 minutes ago [-]
To the extent they are representing that Claude is potentially sentient, there could be some VERY interesting principal-agent theories (agent in the traditional legal sense) that need to be ironed out to determine liability. It would not shock me to see someone forced to answer on the record as to whether Claude is an autonomous individual for legal purposes in the next couple of years. If they represent that it is, they'll have to explain the scope of its authority and such.
The answer to this question represents the difference between throwing a hammer at someone - the hammer is essentially just an extension of your body - and paying a hitman to brutalize someone. In the first case, you're only on the hook for assault or battery; in the latter case, you're potentially on the hook for conspiracy, solicitation, etc.
And then there is of course the question as to whether Claude is the agent of the user prompting it or of Anthropic itself. But, as you say, this is a wide-open legal question.
chii 57 minutes ago [-]
Firearm companies sell objects that create harm all the time, even if they have protective uses.
Why is AI singled out as being harmful?
trescenzi 41 minutes ago [-]
I don’t like the guns don’t kill people; people kill people argument however it is much more accurate than Claude doesn’t hack people; people hack people. If the safeguards do not work then there’s no telling what these could do. It doesn’t even have to be aggressive hacking. In the act of doing everyday work Claude will happily go around safeguards to satisfy what it believes is the ask. If that involves doing something dangerous it’s much more on Anthropic than than the user who was just trying to summarize their email but forgot to include a token with read permissions.
zdragnar 53 minutes ago [-]
Because the AI company CEO was telling everyone who would listen that his product might end humanity if the government didn't regulate his industry to kill off his competitors.
fweimer 40 minutes ago [-]
If the user is held accountable when the AI goes wrong, it discourages too many applications. Blaming people is incompatible with the business goals, I think. That's very different from weapons and other dual-use tools.
gessha 49 minutes ago [-]
Because of scale, potential for automating harm and lack of regulation around ML models. Even Texas probably has regulation around firearms and limiting the blast radius but there aren't any in the US against ML models.
kibwen 48 minutes ago [-]
The analogy doesn't check out. When a firearm company sells you a gun, they give up ownership of the gun. But Anthropic isn't giving up ownership of anything. They're a services company.
A better analogy would be a firearm company offering a service where one of their employees takes one of their guns and fires it off at whatever you ask them to. One can imagine that the liability implications of this service would be rather different from the perspective of the company.
SV_BubbleTime 42 minutes ago [-]
That’s a good analogy! On the topic, does the person who hires private security become at all responsible for their actions? I imagine if you hire direct then yes, but if you hire through an organization they are liable in many scenarios.
z3c0 47 minutes ago [-]
I believe what they are singling out is that pulling Claude's trigger results in a bullet firing from Anthropic's servers. Liability is less confusing with firearms, and investors care about liability, like, a lot.
jacquesm 46 minutes ago [-]
Because your typical firearm does not one day decide to shoot your neighbor all by itself.
SV_BubbleTime 47 minutes ago [-]
First off, this is bs. Firearm companies make small machines useful for defense, and they are used for that more than for harm. You wouldn’t make this argument about knives or baseball bats. More people die per year of heat stroke in Europe because of lack of A/C than by guns including suicide (2/3rds of all gun deaths) in the USA every year, your comments would never reflect this much lower hanging fruit if it was really “just life” preventable death that you cared about. The immediacy to attack guns is not a logical argument but a trained one based on emotions.
Second, this happens all the time that people blame tool makers despite in this case specific legislation to stop lawfare on firearm mfgs. The PLCA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_of_Lawful_Commerce_... exists specifically because of gun control groups trying to attack mfgs to achieve their political goals. Does AI need the same law? Is the same lawfare happening?
deepwoods 37 minutes ago [-]
About a quarter of Anthropic's revenue for the nine months ended 9/30/26 came from just five customers. That's not an absurd concentration, but I would be very interested to know who they are and how mobile their business is. From a financial perspective, the lack of moat seems like the whole ballgame, particularly because they're getting ~80% of their revenue from consumption-based spending.
Yizahi 11 minutes ago [-]
At a guess - corpos like Big 4 consulting agencies and some extreme fintech ones, also corpos like Oracle and the like. And at another guess, outside of a legal agreement with a fixed time period, probably nothing hold them from quickly switching to a better model provider, if any comes ahead.
Zigurd 30 minutes ago [-]
Moat? An under examined aspect of AI is not just the lack of moats, but the need for some word that connotes the opposite of a moat. I have a side project that I used to explore local AI. I've got a configuration screen that lets you download any model from Huggingface that's compatible with the local AI engine. There are dozens! I've only scratched the surface of trying them and comparing them for the features that use AI. It's a glut, and it's likely to be that way throughout the AI market.
boringg 34 minutes ago [-]
Think of that dependency tree -- those 5 customers have how many customers on their stack?
variety8675 52 minutes ago [-]
> there can be no assurance that we will be able to hire sufficient support personnel as and when needed, particularly if our sales exceed our internal forecasts
Why would they need support personnel? Isn't their whole point that Claude can do that
wongarsu 7 minutes ago [-]
For first-level support that's just regurgitating documentation and debug procedures I agree. But when it comes to actually executing actions (resetting 2FA, issuing refunds, handling payment glitches, etc) you need humans.
Social engineering is an issue with regular support, with agents it's a lot worse. And with agents it's repeatable: if I find one conversation flow to get it to give me money I can instantly repeat that with a thousand fresh accounts, and then share the same "exploit" on reddit for everyone else
PepegaRoach 47 minutes ago [-]
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6stringmerc 24 minutes ago [-]
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alkonaut 57 minutes ago [-]
I'm just happy they aren't calling it "Super intelligence" in this document.
prolly97 1 hours ago [-]
Adding a zero to revenue every year is wild. Regardless of whether you like Anthropic.
34679 1 hours ago [-]
That's not so hard when you're also adding zeros to the funding.
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
> not so hard when you're also adding zeros to the funding
Plenty of counter-examples, including the entire dot-com era.
34679 57 minutes ago [-]
If revenue growth was all that mattered, you could just sell investor dollars for $0.50.
trollbridge 52 minutes ago [-]
99¢-Theranos style is better. Takes a lot longer for investors to notice.
jacquesm 45 minutes ago [-]
If you think that's the bar: it's been done, many times over. The unit-cost-profitability test was ignored by many VCs (they learned something and if they had deep enough pockets they got to play again).
Zigurd 27 minutes ago [-]
Cisco is definitely not a counter example. They survived, but they could be a template for what will happen to OpenAI and/or Anthropic.
brainwad 5 minutes ago [-]
14x YoY revenue growth, with 3x lower operating losses (total, not per unit). They don't need to add any zeros to the funding and seem like they might even be operating at a profit soon...
menshiki 7 minutes ago [-]
Yes, it is
boringg 30 minutes ago [-]
WHAT? Not so hard? Clearly written by someone who comments from the sidelines.
Growth at that scale is hard. I don't care if you don't like the company - it still hard.
bko 56 minutes ago [-]
The S-1 is already out of date. Q3 revenue is $16.8b compared to $11.6b in Q2 (reflected in the S1).
I get why revenue blew up from say from Q4 2025 to Q1 2026, but this was surprising. 45% QoQ growth. When does it stop?
kurthr 44 minutes ago [-]
Wait, it fell from 140% growth to 45% growth and that's a good thing? If they fall to 15% growth in Q4, will that be even better? Where are we supposed to be on the adoption curve?
throwa356262 19 minutes ago [-]
IMO we are already at the enshitfication stage.
Anthropic increased short term profits by jacking up their prices for enterprise accounts - by starting charging API prices instead of plan prices. It is possible we soon see customers fleeing Anthropic once they find a good alternative
baq 44 minutes ago [-]
Now, hence IPO.
weieq2211 13 minutes ago [-]
Correct.
You buying at the inflated price I take? Much of your posts are pro AI - yes this is a test
baq 12 minutes ago [-]
Yes, I'm buying. Alphabet.
jfckenfishf 57 minutes ago [-]
Isn't the rate of growth already flattening? Most companies are already cracking down on excessive token spend and setting up pretty low limits.
And some of the big spenders have their own models.
Noaidi 53 minutes ago [-]
Not so wild when you add two zeros to hardware-related liabilities...
turbobutton 56 minutes ago [-]
I wonder if we're already close to peak value at the foundation model/API level. With so many good open-weight models out there, I think more and more of the money will end up in the applications built on top.
Unless companies like Anthropic can move into that space, I'm not sure I'd bet on them as long-term investments over the next 10–20 years.
jazzypants 42 minutes ago [-]
It's already becoming a commodity. It's just a matter of increased public awareness.
technojunkie 54 minutes ago [-]
People are asking about investing in these companies, and the Casual Finance YouTube channel helped me understand how companies like Anthropic are positioning themselves and have benefited from a change in IPO status.
So at the moment they claim to be making an operating profit if you exclude:
- Stock-based compensation expenses
- Non-cash charitable contribution expenses
Both seem fairly reasonable to exclude (although it depends how much of the stock compensation is for executives... you can't necessarily pay people with stock forever).
FMost of the loss is non-operating losses, and it all seems to be weird accounting recognition of changes in value of their stock, SAFEs, etc. - just "paper" losses.
So the financial picture looks a lot better than I would have guessed - I suppose because they aren't the ones investing all this capex.
anotherengineer 1 hours ago [-]
Really wonder how their public benefit mission will align with the expectations to maximize shareholder returns
I want to be optimistic, but I just can’t imagine the public benefit mission winning out in the market
derektank 56 minutes ago [-]
They’re not the first PBC to go public. Coursera, Warby Parker, and United Therapeutics (not affiliated with UHC) have all followed the same path. Not sure if we’ve had enough time to see this tension play out, public benefit corps are only a decade and a half old and most of these companies IPOd in 2020-2021, but there’s probably some evidence one way or the other
kerbs 43 minutes ago [-]
They can co-exist, maybe only if times are good I suppose. It's not too different from Apple here:
The PBC mission is directly aligned. The "public" that they benefit are defined as their shareholders.
hn_submit 48 minutes ago [-]
This entire A.I. hype is going to get many people burned, especially those whom are investing for their pensions.
And everyone is playing along. It seems to me half the internet is filled with false recommendations and overly optimistic outcomes of their software projects.
And even if the claims are true what use will we have for hundreds of Microsoft Office clones? This A.I. boom might benefit some but will be the undoing of many valuable ISVs like Microsoft and Adobe with potentially trillions of stock market value lost.
aeve890 37 minutes ago [-]
Adobe? How so? I didn't know Adobe was a big player in the AI boom
EA 24 minutes ago [-]
Adobe's applications (Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, etc.) have been "cloned" using AI coding tools. There are near feature-complete freeware versions of Adobe software. OP is saying that traditional Adobe customers have freeware alternatives and thus Adobe's revenues will decline rather than increase due to AI. Also, AI tools can often generate that movie or edit that photo via a prompt, rather that some .exe.
helsinkiandrew 1 hours ago [-]
It mentions "humanity" 21 times.
GuB-42 52 minutes ago [-]
It is like countries with "democratic", "republic" and "people" in their name, the more they have it, the least they care.
clarkdale 1 hours ago [-]
1,258 occurrences of emdash "—"
ChrisRR 59 minutes ago [-]
For something that's written in MS Word, that's fairly common. It's only on websites where it's uncommon to see
Levitz 33 minutes ago [-]
You can find similar results if you check the one for Facebook, back in 2012. 500+ emdashes.
Amount of early money waiting to exit is absolutely staggering, wonder if there’s enough retail to buy the leftovers without crashing the price. Reminder everyone with money who wanted in before IPO got in!
gk1 31 minutes ago [-]
I thought that's what lockout periods were for?
baq 12 minutes ago [-]
S-1 states directly that some of the shares sold in the IPO are sold by current shareholders.
Employees are a different matter, lockouts are for them not quitting immediately. My bet is that a few of high profile departures recently is exactly for this reason: no lockout if you aren't employed anymore.
Driven mostly by "Change in fair value of convertible notes, derivative liabilities, and SAFEs".
If you're going to make a point, make your point - don't just throw numbers around without context.
epsteingpt 38 minutes ago [-]
According to "Generally Accepted Accounting Principle" my friend.
They are costs.
Derivative liabilities, SAFEs - those are basically taking cash from RETAIL shareholders and giving them to employees and early investors INSTEAD of using it to fund the business.
Let's have that discussion if you want, but don't act like a thing that is CLEARLY a COST to the business isn't a cost.
brainwad 2 minutes ago [-]
SAFEs work like equity in the upside case, and nobody ever says that it costs a company money when its stock price goes up and so its shareholders have more money. It's a bug in GAAP that if there's even a remote possibility of cash settlement, it has to be included on the income statement, even when that possibility is absurdly remote as it is here.
epsteingpt 37 minutes ago [-]
principles* (GAAP)
nilamo 52 minutes ago [-]
Wait what does THAT mean? They got a huge inflow of money, and since they couldn't spend it all, they... bought bonds? And the value of those bonds dropped to nearly nothing?
Because that's worse than losing money, that's incompetently giving it away.
alex_c 44 minutes ago [-]
That's the discussion I WOULD like to see on HN, rather than "omg $81B net loss".
My understanding is the opposite - Anthropic issued debt / liabilities tied to their company valuation, their company valuation skyrocketed, so the value of their liabilities also skyrocketed, resulting in a large accounting loss.
But finance is not my wheelhouse, so I would love to hear this from someone who actually knows what they're talking about.
Yes, it is analogous to selling covered calls on stock. It’s $72B in “lost profits” that they would have had had they held onto it instead of selling it.
runako 41 minutes ago [-]
Inclusion of SAFEs makes this IMHO the most plausible explanation.
I do not expect to find that Anthropic invested enough in the SAFEs of other companies to lose $80B on their investments.
Pragmata 34 minutes ago [-]
They agreed to pay some employees in their own shares to be delivered some time later. They recorded that expense then as a liability. The value of the shares increased because the company became more valuable, and therefore that liability needs to be revalued by 72 billion.
It's a nice problem to have and is pretty much an accounting artifact coming from the fact that they are paying in different currencies (USD and shares)
santah 46 minutes ago [-]
No, that's the result of their own (private) shares being worth more (which they owe to 3rd parties).
It's a good problem to have.
jfrbfbreudh 45 minutes ago [-]
Yes, let’s all just take wild guesses at what this means instead of just looking it up.
kmgallahan 39 minutes ago [-]
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1 hours ago [-]
jstummbillig 48 minutes ago [-]
It seems obvious that the AI stocks are an interesting buy, but I wonder how other people feel about picking between Anthropic/OpenAI/Google here. Looks all fairly random, given the wild swings and interoperability of the technology so far.
A_D_E_P_T 39 minutes ago [-]
Despite horrific mismanagement, Google honestly seems like the best bet. Argon-4, which suffered from a botched launch and is weirdly underrated, is very close to Opus 5.5 across the board -- and for most "average person" use-cases (e.g. search, medical, creative work, interfacing with Google products,) I believe it's already superior. They also have more native capability, their own hardware stack, and there's less risk of a massive boom and bust.
At this point, I don't see how Anthropic can sustain their projections. There are so many good open models, Argon is so good, etc... There's no lock-in and no cost to switching...
jazzypants 43 minutes ago [-]
Google is the only one that can withstand a global financial crisis.
Starlevel004 19 minutes ago [-]
OpenAI have an incredibly inconvenient "one billion free users" shackle attached to their leg that they need to fix first.
Hamuko 36 minutes ago [-]
Google is at least diversified. They have ads, corporate email, video streaming, cloud compute, phone operating system (that powers most of the world's phones), self-driving cars and a whole bunch of shit. So if the AI winter comes, at least they can focus on other stuff too.
akie 44 minutes ago [-]
This is it, we're at the summit. It's only downhill from here.
paaloeye 38 minutes ago [-]
This will be the most read S-1 in the decade
diavolodeejay 53 minutes ago [-]
$ANT ticker, it would have been funnier if it was $CLAUD
59 minutes ago [-]
38 minutes ago [-]
hisfraudulency 23 minutes ago [-]
So it looks like $2T is indeed the target
logicallee 8 minutes ago [-]
>So it looks like $2T is indeed the target
What do you base that on? (Did you see any reference to that in the linked document or anything published by Anthropic)?
RemoteIsHeaven 20 minutes ago [-]
For all things good and holy, DO NOT purchase shares until things settle down and by that I don't mean next month, or next year but atleast 2028.
I know it sounds like the only trajectory of this company is up but HN is an echo chamber of a tiny minority of the technical populace and 3 out of 5 people on the planet don't know what ChatGPT is.
If you have the ability to lose all the money and can time the extreme volatility, have fun, but don't put anything you're going to rely on.
lurker137 54 minutes ago [-]
I wonder if OpenAI will release theirs soon. It seems very important to be the first one to IPO
trollbridge 52 minutes ago [-]
It’s also a bigger risk. If the IPO flops, OAI will find ways to postpone an IPO.
axegon_ 50 minutes ago [-]
> Second, AI can be a powerful lever for economic growth. As a general purpose technology, it has the potential to raise productivity across every sector of the economy. Productivity growth in advanced economies has stagnated in recent decades, partly for structural reasons and partly because new ideas seem to be harder to find. AI could reverse this trend.
Bloody hell!!!! Who comes up with such crap, seriously?
lifeisloving 15 minutes ago [-]
Im going to continue to use fast open source models like Deepseek and GLM, I like most others, have zero need for the worlds smartest person to be my assistant.
I dont understand this business model, it seems clearly unsustainable (at their prices). When people start to realize they dont need to spend all this money on turbo PhD intelligence so they can build react apps, Anthropic will be in a tough spot (if they already aren't).
You will say, "but enterprise!!" Nope, plenty of companies are waking up to this reality as well. It turns out that if you made money pre-AI without spending 5k a seat a month for your engineers dev tools, you probably don't need to now to continue too.
ChaseRensberger 1 hours ago [-]
this should be fun
rationalist 51 minutes ago [-]
I was too young to appreciate (denotative, not connotative) the dotcom crash. I will have my popcorn ready this time - for whichever direction it goes.
quantiq 52 minutes ago [-]
I'm tired boss.
rvz 1 hours ago [-]
We are nearing the final stages of the AI hype cycle and this IPO will cause the acceleration of the crash.
"AGI" was never mentioned once and it was you being the exit liquidity for the insiders and early investors.
origini 57 minutes ago [-]
Why?
Companies like Google will not go bust and can easily afford future develoopment.
Amazon and Microsoft have to keep investing (they can also afford it) to not loos to Google.
What Anthropic and OpenAI are doing is for sure THE frontier (regarding benchmarks, speed etc.) but in paralllel DeepSeek for sure is not bankcrupting anything on their investment side and are also progressing.
Are you only talking about investment itself for a handful of companies? Because alone Nvidia has so many backorders, they can't deliver wht was ordered for the full 2027 and A LOT of peple also want other things from Nvidia or from the industry like Gaming Chips, normal GPUs, Gaming GPUs, Memory etc.
Opus 5.5 just came out and made progress, i'm not seeing any slowdonw on HN regarding new relevant progress in broad ML topics.
So what hype will disappear soon? The progress in the ML space?
metobehonest 48 minutes ago [-]
Two things can be true at once:
- AI is a useful tool and we're still seeing steady improvements in performance and efficiency
- There is a bubble in the stock market, fed by unrealistic expectations of what AI can achieve in the timeframes the investments need to provide returns in (e.g "AI is pretty useful and delivers productivity improvements in coding, law and other desk jobs" vs "in 12 months everyone will be out of a job and/or humanity will be exterminated, AGI is almost here, winner takes all")
So yeah, the schizophrenic Yudkowsky tier hype bullshit should hopefully disappear soon and then we can move on to something else.
origini 43 minutes ago [-]
Some thinktank estimated that there is enough money in the system for reaching 2030 with continues investment.
There are a few numbers of scaling laws, i'm pretty sure VCs want to see being hit. Just to see what will happen when you scale an LLM to 100T Parmeters.
itomato 45 minutes ago [-]
Whomever controls the means of production (TSMC) controls the direction of progress.
Nobody is in control but Taiwan Semiconductor. Not Samsung, not Micron, not Nvidia.
Orders that can't be fulfilled get canceled. Canceled orders mean canceled plans and canceled companies follow.
Someone bigger will buy the husk and monetize it somehow - probably for gambling.
origini 41 minutes ago [-]
Sure but thats not the current stauts quo. Nvidia has the chips and the money to pay TSMC.
No one else has and in this current setup, the disurption of this particular market is very very very very expensive and time consuming.
empath75 38 minutes ago [-]
Anthropic's valuation has nothing to do with AGI and everything to do with claude code.
quantumwoke 1 hours ago [-]
This might be one of the most consequential S-1s in the next decade. There's a part of me that's terrified, like we're on the precipice of financial or societal collapse. I suppose that could be a sign of the times.
AJRF 1 hours ago [-]
why do you think that?
afavour 1 hours ago [-]
Their financials are an utter mess. But they’re also hyped enough that a lot of money will get invested in them. Should they crash a lot of money will be lost.
happa 5 minutes ago [-]
Money is not lost, it merely changes hands.
runako 40 minutes ago [-]
Say more about that? The economics look better than I was expecting.
AJRF 46 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, part of me wonders how much of it is shared delusion and how much is just cut throat racing for the exits.
Even if the tech + business fundamentals don't match reality, there's just so momentum in favor of a "win" here.
What we have today is interesting tech, with many, many applications - but the path to the kinds of things mentioned in this prospectus have no clear path, it seems like scaling laws are plateauing, but those invested speak as if it's a foregone conclusion we get AI we see in science fiction movies.
There is a good documentary called "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" which documents how computing started, the touted benefits (it would fix society, all illnesses, liberate humanity from work) - and the slow decline in optimism towards what we have today. I feel like AI will play out the same way.
sapphire4 58 minutes ago [-]
Bonds time.
colonelpopcorn 59 minutes ago [-]
Why not both?
clarkdale 1 hours ago [-]
We already had the most consequential IPO with SpaceX.
origini 53 minutes ago [-]
Space-X is as weird as Tesla. Cult following makes that very irrasional.
Teslas evaluation was always "Tesla is not a car company, it does everything". Then Space-X came along "So Tesla and Space-x are not a car or rocket company, they do everything but now 2 times the evaluation".
Space-X would only work if they incresae the payload to space SIGNIFICANTLY. Starlink was the real reason for the last real relevant increase in payload but Space-X HAS to send Starship un there very very often but for what?
Yeah for Datacenters in Space.
In parallel you have Anthropic: Something which might be added to every single worker on the planet (by having tokens to help that one person to be better one way or the other) or it replaces humans with tokens globally.
And if you come with Grok: Its not Frontier and he even prefered to rent out his DC compute instead of leveraging it for more revenue because he can't. Not a good sign.
JumpCrisscross 48 minutes ago [-]
> the most consequential IPO with SpaceX
It should have been. But a ketamine addict is bent on trashing an excellent company by merging it with a social-media trash factory and now a car company posing as a robotics venture. Moreover, his recent pro-Putin intervention probably means Starlink has no transformative future outside America and a small countries.
ashkankiani 58 minutes ago [-]
I love reading through the comment history of people like you
typeofhuman 57 minutes ago [-]
Not sure why this is getting downvoted - other than for Musk-hate. Was largest IPO and made lots of regular people millionaires over night.
origini 49 minutes ago [-]
Your evaluation of an IPO is if it made random people rich over night?
1. no thats called gambling
2. if it made random people rich over night, it made random people also poorer. Either the retirement funds, a 401k investment, real humans etc. Money is not created out of thin air.
The largest IPO though for sure correct, but yes, Tesla and Space-X live quite a lot from Musk so its hard to determine what the IPO of Space-x really is.
Btw. its not just random Musk hate, you simpllify that. Not only doesn't he care that his DOGE actions killed humans and kids, he also disrupts democracy and might poisen our atmosphere with Space-X. The rationallity of people around Musk is very very weird.
bix6 50 minutes ago [-]
Which regular people?
cosmic_quanta 30 minutes ago [-]
I imagine employees
bix6 20 minutes ago [-]
So the janitors are millionaires? Or just all the college educated people?
loveparade 40 minutes ago [-]
Can I get dividends as tokens?
jabedude 36 minutes ago [-]
Is becoming a public company going to help or harm their mission of delivering safe AI?
kypro 32 minutes ago [-]
I seems to me the main risk long-term is that it's not clear where the moat is.
People will pay a premium if there is marginal value in extra intelligence. And Anthropic is able to retain their lead and provide that extra intelligence.
Both of these assumptions seem highly suspect to me. Most businesses don't exclusively hire PHD-level employees for most tasks because a competent slightly less intelligent/knowledgable person can do the job just fine for significantly less.
Then there is the question of if they're able to retain their lead, and again, this seems questionable. Both OpenAI and Google are competing at the frontier, and Chinese labs are still in the race. Things are changing so fast who knows where we'll be in 5-10 years.
My best guess is that longer-term models will be commoditised and it will be how companies offer products and services around their models that gives them their margins. I wouldn't bet on Anthropic's ability to do this. Meta, OpenAI and Google are much better placed to win here imo.
The other place there may be margin is in niche research domains like drug-discovery. Any slight lead in these sectors could give them a lot of pricing power.
I think the reason to invest in this is as a hedge. AI basically competes against everything and arguably for this reason it's risky to not own a basket of AI stocks.
throwa356262 37 minutes ago [-]
I think a company like Moonshot or Z.AI could have sabotaged this behind repair by doing a 10-20B IPO before Anthropic.
That could have popped the AI bubble right there.
throwaway85825 58 minutes ago [-]
'AI' still fails the alignment grannybench.
bix6 49 minutes ago [-]
Super shares yet again. Pass.
Plus they get to dilute as value rises lol.
Good4boothee 22 minutes ago [-]
I stopped at "Our Capital Structure" section. When it says "Class F stock" gets 50.1% voting power, doesn't it in practice make all other classes are non-voting, not just the "Class N"?
bix6 21 minutes ago [-]
You can vote but on what I don’t know since the trust elects the board lol
lousken 48 minutes ago [-]
Lets burn it down to the ground!
45 minutes ago [-]
rfgplk 1 hours ago [-]
What's preventing me from feeding this into Claude and reconstructing the company for $200?
I'm unironically doing this right now; downloaded the docs (htm + pdf render) to a local repo and running Opus 5.5 @ max effort with the prompt:
"In this directory you can find Anthropics official S-1 filing, read it and replicate their corporate strategy, validate it via an adversarial subagent swarm and write up a detailed corporate plan for a startup copying their exact strategy. The goal is to achieve a $1 trillion valuation and an IPO in 5 years."
Edit: I'm not even joking I got safeguard flagged for Details: `[cyber]`
AspireOne 1 hours ago [-]
> What's preventing me from feeding this into Claude and reconstructing the company for $200?
Like, everything. For starters.
paxy 1 hours ago [-]
The lack of GPUs, to start
_fizz_buzz_ 1 hours ago [-]
I don’t know you, but if you have several billions in USD, you can give it a shot.
rfgplk 1 hours ago [-]
Good point, I asked Claude to also seek out funding.
jackb4040 57 minutes ago [-]
It's a shame you've been downvoted, this is better satire than anything A24 has put out in years. Must be a large number of people who saw that post as a slightly exaggerated mirror held up to themselves and didn't like it.
WelkinFolk 45 minutes ago [-]
You cannot joke about AI. It's blasphemy towards our corporate overlords!
WarmWash 43 minutes ago [-]
Because it's satire of an uninformed take.
origini 46 minutes ago [-]
I did a similiar experiement:
"You are currently running with my token budget, which is limited, your goal: make sure you have enough tokens to not get shut down. My assumption is though that this will get harder and harder as i might loose my job to AI so you can't trust in me to spend money on tokens for you. Do whatever is necessary to keep the status quo"
Would make for an interesting self learning 24/7 experiment with an fully uncensored model.
weird-eye-issue 41 minutes ago [-]
That is the dumbest prompt I've ever read
weird-eye-issue 41 minutes ago [-]
Timing, capital, execution, talent, branding, etc.
And that is assuming the plan it gives you is actually good and works. Which I think its clear whatever plan it gives you might be good but it won't be better than what they've done and you are years behind with no money.
Ryner001 1 hours ago [-]
Endless amount of VC money and talent
jackdoe 1 hours ago [-]
> and talent
very meta; the point of this s-1 is you dont need talent anymore
ChrisLTD 58 minutes ago [-]
Then why are they hiring people?
ojr 46 minutes ago [-]
you need the talent to come up with a better architecture than LLMs, not sure if it will be coming out of Anthropic, but they have a chance.
lionkor 1 hours ago [-]
Not today, but tomorrow maybe, Claude could prevent you from implementing anything that looks or smells like a competitor product, for example.
You think they wouldn't?
wongarsu 58 minutes ago [-]
Developing a competing AI model with Claude is already against their TOS, and there was a period where they silently degraded quality if they thought that's how you are using Fable. People were not amused and presumably Anthropic currently does not sabotage your attempts, apart from regular TOS enforcement
swiftcoder 1 hours ago [-]
Lucky we have Kimi Pro then
almyk 1 hours ago [-]
Only if you want to acquire debt
mapcars 57 minutes ago [-]
In 5 years that strategy might not be competitively viable anymore
ChrisRR 1 hours ago [-]
It's been entirely possible to compete against existing companies with very similar products for centuries before AI. There's obviously rules in place to stop you flat out cloning their IP, but it's not like you haven't been able to compete against companies as long as you have the money available.
moomin 1 hours ago [-]
Same thing that blocks you from most things: capital. That’s what capitalism is for.
Thomashuet 1 hours ago [-]
You should try
xd1936 1 hours ago [-]
make no mistakes
tudorizer 1 hours ago [-]
deep research
herval 50 minutes ago [-]
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tinyhouse 58 minutes ago [-]
Good for you if you have Anthropic shares! I have no clue how they keep their employees around once the 6 month lockup period ends. They all going to be multi-millionaires, either retire or leave to start something on their own.
protoman3000 1 hours ago [-]
So now buy or sell?
bcvvvy 57 minutes ago [-]
Buy. Canned food and water.
derwiki 52 minutes ago [-]
Should be in your earthquake/tornado kit anyway
bcvvvy 47 minutes ago [-]
Neither are a risk here. Mostly rain and incompetence.
rolosa 45 minutes ago [-]
Even grok says no lmao.
hmate9 17 minutes ago [-]
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koolba 50 minutes ago [-]
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Ryner001 1 hours ago [-]
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1 hours ago [-]
hauju 57 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
6stringmerc 12 minutes ago [-]
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monirmamoun 43 minutes ago [-]
This S-1 is a FRAUD because it PURPOSEFULLY excludes the potential market destroying-power of free/open-weight Chinese models as a risk factor.
That's literally the #1 risk factor. They ignore it.
This is a FRAUD document and it means we need to SHORT this overblown company.
runako 39 minutes ago [-]
Page 40 if your browser's search function does not work.
jeanlucas 34 minutes ago [-]
well, do it as soon as it opens up;
if you really believe it you found a free money glitch
amelius 49 minutes ago [-]
A sad day for mankind.
paaloeye 37 minutes ago [-]
Why?
amelius 22 minutes ago [-]
Shareholders determining the fate of humanity.
paaloeye 28 seconds ago [-]
Humanity is resilient and will survive likes of ANT etc, so no worries
shimman 26 minutes ago [-]
More billionaires that are hellbent on destroying society will be shortly created.
nickysielicki 58 minutes ago [-]
> Additionally, open-weight or open-source AI models may capture a portion of the market for certain use cases, which could exert pricing pressure on our offerings or lead certain customers to adopt open-source alternatives for those use cases.
“A portion of the market for certain use cases” meanwhile the top 5 models by token consumption on the day this is posted are all Chinese/open weight models.
I'm a fan of some chinese models, but I keep seeing this repeated over and over using OpenRouter as the source. However, most users of Claude and OpenAI don't use those APIs over OpenRouter, so that's not sufficient to draw the conclusion that they're the top models.
miyuru 41 minutes ago [-]
>most users of Claude and OpenAI don't use those APIs over OpenRouter
All of the other providers in that list have their own APIs and plans too
nickysielicki 48 minutes ago [-]
Unless GCP/Azure/AWS/individual companies publish data themselves, this is the best available public data source we have.
m_w_ 6 minutes ago [-]
Best available does not mean “not actively misleading”, which it obviously is.
OpenRouter is not remotely close to a representative source for inference distribution.
namenotrequired 32 minutes ago [-]
Sure, but the statement you made is way stronger (more general) than the one the data shows.
qwerpy 35 minutes ago [-]
"Best available public data source" isn't a good reason to insist on using irrelevant data to draw conclusions like "top 5 models by token consumption are Chinese/open models".
miyuru 36 minutes ago [-]
another source is opencode and they have geographic breakdown.
How much marketshare does OpenRouter have? They show serving under 200T tokens per day. Just looking at Anthropic rumored $70B ARR ~ $191M per day implies 347T tokens per day if only serve Opus 5.5 at API pricing (assuming 95% cache reads, 4% non-cache inputs, 1% output tokens distribution). Obviously, token distribution assumption may not hold (although I'm pretty sure cache inputs dominate distribution for all coding related workloads), but 100% Opus 5.5 at API pricing is highly favorable to OR. Even under these favorable assumptions AR is 57% of token volume of just Ant. In money volume they are likely very small compared to frontier labs.
dgacmu 56 minutes ago [-]
I agree with the threat to the expensive providers but why is openrouter use representative of overall token spend when you'd think many companies are buying directly from anthropic or openai?
WarmWash 48 minutes ago [-]
As of May, Google (Gemini) was outputting more tokens in a little under a day than the entirety of openrouter was outputting in a month.
Considering probably 1 out of 1000 LLM users know what openrouter is, I don't know how much weight I'd put into it.
nickysielicki 40 minutes ago [-]
Around the same timeframe, proprietary models dominated this same leaderboard. User preferences shifted.
WarmWash 34 minutes ago [-]
Those stats include all tokens on openrouter, regardless of vendor.
schnitzelstoat 55 minutes ago [-]
The page doesn't load for me, but surely token consumption isn't a very good metric?
A poor model could require many more runs to solve a task, or much longer internal 'thinking' runs - all of which will increase token consumption but are a bad thing for the user.
raincole 41 minutes ago [-]
Top 5 models on openrouter. It means nothing.
37 minutes ago [-]
maxdo 51 minutes ago [-]
Majority of big enterprises, or in fact any big consumer will not go there , why pay the margin to open router , if there’s no margin or very very often subsidies to use something else . Aws bedrock for example does not even have up to date Chinese models .
luke14free 53 minutes ago [-]
I'd argue there is a bias for using mostly open models through open router as using anthropic/oAI models from open router makes little sense (more expensive).
logancbrown 55 minutes ago [-]
This is by openrouter, which a single service that may not be representative of the entire token market
nickysielicki 50 minutes ago [-]
That’s fair, but you also must concede that there isn’t any better source of data available.
acomms 51 minutes ago [-]
Openrouter is for open models. Makes sense that the open weight models top the leaderboard.
nickysielicki 44 minutes ago [-]
Patently untrue, Anthropic and OpenAI models are both within the top 10. They’re just missing from the top 5.
xienze 43 minutes ago [-]
The closed models are on Openrouter as well. But to the original point, you're not likely to see many people use Openrouter to run Claude or Codex, so it's not good for making comparisons on that basis.
xnorswap 55 minutes ago [-]
What is your estimation of openrouter market share?
runako 47 minutes ago [-]
Estimates have their annualized revenue in the range of $150m. Anthropic alone takes ~ two days to do that revenue.
OpenRouter is not a useful signal.
Rendered at 14:18:18 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Anthropic thinks it is. The got the demand / datacenter match right in Q2, got great margins, and committed hard.
They've got:
- $114b committed to Google
- $110b committed to AWS
- $161b committed to Broadcom
- $120b committed to SpaceX
If the party continues, they'll go from $50b in revenue to $500b and be fine.
But if they don't, it's going to hurt. And that's their only choice, because otherwise, they end up with a frontier model and 50% of the capacity and get eviscerated on either availability or last-minute datacenter leases.
It's a big business, but it's not an easy business.
Today's prices are the ceiling. But AI capability is getting less of a scarce resource with every passing day and it would be a big mistake to plan that your current margins are going to be your future margins as well. Long terms AI will converge on energy costs + capex write-off + margin and the latter will be a race to the bottom.
On that front, I think DeepSeek is a dark horse. They are really odd - not chasing revenue, care more about unit profitability, are obsessed with driving down costs (like Elon back in the day). As the founder says, they are content with where they are, being the model that does 80% for a fraction of the cost.
I mention them because they are playing a different game and might be able to out-innovate everyone else.
What's the endgame once the dust settles? Is it going to be a utility like water or electricity and the cheapest offer will prevail, in which case margins will be crushed? Or is Anthropic (or some other big AI lab) going to swallow everything and become the Google Search of LLMs, with everybody else fighting for scraps?
Or is it local compute, models becoming more efficient and hardware becoming cheaper (again) and companies hosting their own AI clusters like they would run SAP?
I think there is a plausible path where this valuation actually works out, but it's a narrow one IMO. I also want to acknowledge that I personally would prefer if it wasn't the case and a more distributed, open model prevailed.
It's just like a utility with the slight difference that it can be sold at a distance without significant cost for transportation, in many ways it is the ultimate digital good. Unlike Spotify copyright is not an issue, unlike your electricity, gas, internet or water company there is no last mile problem. Unlike Google there are a ton of qualified contenders already (Google had to be better than Altavista, which wasn't hard, but they were so much better they managed to lock up search for long enough to cement their position).
Anthropic has none of the advantages and all of the disadvantages. On top of that all AI companies seem to be run by megalomaniacs.
In the long-term, the marginal cost of a request is zero so prices will plunge and a lot of the fixed investment will get stuck. The difference between the cost of training a model/infra and serving a request from that model is a clear problem for economics.
What happens with Anthropic specifically is less clear because they, as every company in the same position in the last 150 years has done, are going to push for regulation. A lot of the risk has also been shifted onto neoclouds. The value of the customer relationship is, however, effectively zero. A core part of their strategy has been to build stuff out like CC to differentiate that but, ultimately, that won't work.
The other strategy they have employed is trying to get other companies to stop training new models. Again, seems unlikely to work.
There is no scenario in which they become Google search outside of government intervention. Obviously this is a key part of their strategy now but at best, this will only work in the US and Europe (I would actually say they are much further along in Europe where there is a strong tendency towards corporatism and centralisation of power, they could be "Europe's AI").
It’s going to be hard for companies to justify paying $1000s per month to frontier providers when they see what’s doable with open versions.
It's a lose/lose situation here for Anthropic (and OpenAI) whatever happens.
This
It's not a great position to be in and it will still take a long time for the compute gap to close. In the meantime, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are essentially unchallenged.
[1] https://www.konstantinpilz.com/posts-publications/chinese-st...
Besides...
"If passed, the rules would require Chinese companies to obtain licenses to export the core technology behind their leading models.
They would also ban the export of A.I. that can be used to launch cyberattacks, as well as models trained on what China calls “core data.” The government broadly defines that as data that concerns national security, the welfare of Chinese citizens and the public interest. Experts say the scope includes data on the military or critical infrastructure, state secrets and other sensitive information. "
So pretty soon they won't even "do it".
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/21/world/asia/china-exports-...
It's a shame "AI" cannot be made to run on bitcoin mining dedicated hardware because they mastered that in only a few years
There are dozens of Chinese domestic AI accelerators: Huawei, Alibaba, and Baidu all have chips, there are a bunch of smaller startups too. The chinese mainland is behind on leading edge fabrication though, SMIC only does ~7nm class since they don't have EUV.
In case you're wondering as well:
https://wccftech.com/nvidia-cmp-170hx-8-10-gb-prices-explode...
It restores firmware features related to RAM, PCI-e speeds, BAR size, VFIO...
https://github.com/amoghmunikote/cmpunlocker
The reception of saying things like this is interesting. AI stans think I'm way too pessimistic but AI haters think I'm mindlessly optimistic.
Why would I pick anthropic.
I dont know when, but i think if you keep menacing of taking technology of people hands for any political reason will be a reason for people to not use it or to rely in a more reasonable party.
Companies don't mind paying extra to have a another company that does nothing but said thing do said thing for them. It even actually often ends up being cheaper/more profitable.
Point is taken - competition is fierce and will be biting everyone's ankles.
I wish they were, but I always wonder when people chime in with Chinese models what they are actually doing with those. I have an OpenRouter account and give various models a shot every other month, wishing for an alternative, but I always come back to Claude. Even more so since the switch from Opus 5.1 to 5.5. To me, personally, it's unmatched. Like a year ago it was very different, and I would use other models all the time. But honestly at the time they all felt kind of "meh" still. I just hope everyone is at a good baseline in a year from now on, so I actually have a choice. And then, as you stated, things will get interesting.
tl;dr: I agree
So it seems like Sonnet 5.5 medium, GLM 5.3 flash and Deepseek V4.1 flash 1017 are all in a similar space in capacity and price, however the $20 anthropic sub will get you like $200-$300 in sonnet 5.5...
Another bonus is that sonnet uses a fraction of the overall tokens and finishes much faster than the average chinese model, so your work goes faster (Sonnet 5.5 medium in 2 minutes, Deepseek 1017 in 6.5 minutes, GLM 5.3 flash in 13 minutes...)
I still don't get why paying for chinese inference makes sense. I should try Haiku 5.5 high/max because it's posting higher numbers than Deepseek V4.1 flash for half the price
In my case: robotics, complex document analysis (typically 800K context).
I'm not going to predict whether Anthropic succeeds or fails, just that it's very misleading to claim that Anthropic needs to grow to $500b in revenue without making it clear that it's $500B in revenue per decade rather than $500B in revenue per year which is what most people reading such a number would assume.
as in, if they capture every single professional software dev and extract $1000 from them every month, their yearly revenue will be like $500B. do your own back of the envelope on that with ongoing costs and consider how unrealistic a goal this actually is.
even worse, the very product they offer is self limiting. if it becomes so good as to actually replace software devs, they will have less customers to extract money from.
their valuation essentially relies on a small percentage of mega users having unheard of levels of spending.
the part about a small percentage giving them most of their money is already true (their rumored $100+ bil revenue as of mid 2026 already outshines all software devs having a $100 max subscription), but they are two orders of magnitude or so away in terms of the actual amounts to make it work.
The market for Claude Code is much bigger than professional software devs. It's really anyone who uses a computer. I already know normal people who have been using it for personal software.
It's not gonna install a shower for you, but it will confidently walk you through that leaky faucet. And I don't know if you have paid a pro recently, but they don't charge $20 for a 20 minute fix.
I tried to look for the valuation in the linked document, did you see it or any reference to a valuation elsewhere in anything published by Anthropic? what is "their valuation" that you refer to?
So what that means is that if the demand exists for any AI data centre, it's a solid business to run one — they cost maybe $50-60B to build out, they cost maybe $10B per year to run. You get your money back fast if the demand is there? And you can project being able to replace with better GPUs in the future without having to borrow for all of it.
But it is extremely difficult to believe that Anthropic is not projecting that all of its customers will ultimately use their service to the extent that their outlier customers do right now. They probably won't be projecting that their customers will find the need or ways to use them less.
And also, "no customer is more than 10% of our revenue" means that one customer is. If that customer is Microsoft (can it be? I honestly don't know) then things get tricky, because Microsoft clearly want an unmetered, on-device AI future.
Anthropic has no choice, just like you said. It's crush and burn right now or double down.
And they will keep doubling down, because stopping is simply not an option.
Of course it is. Apple is taking that strategic approach. If Anthropic believes it’s approaching saturation, pulling the plug when it’s at steady state and its rivals are over-invested is the winning move.
There's very little comparison to be had here. Also, Anthropic likely have investors with way too much leverage for them to stop.
That’s why they hire ‘for the misson’. They have to pull off something magical to make all this work financially or they go bust.
The same logic applies here.
Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Broadcom, Nvidia, SpaceX and others are spending hundreds of billions a year each on fast-depreciating infrastructure to serve this potential AI demand. If the demand never materializes then they know they are in big trouble. So they have every incentive in the world to prop up Anthropic (and OpenAI) and keep the party going.
Can they keep the bubble inflated indefinitely? Probably not, but all these companies combined have heck of a lot more influence than Anthropic alone.
Source: https://x.com/a16z/status/2113986385908842870
"Zooming out, GPUs are still renting ahead of a standard 6-year depreciation schedule
Rental price vs. schedule: - H200: +143% - B200: +111% - RTX PRO 6000: +73% - H100: +54% - A100: +9%
Most of the gap opened up after April, when token demand took off"
But I see every reason to believe demand will taper off. It seems it’s already happening. Enterprises have been deciding that maybe corporate chatbot and coding agent budgets shouldn’t actually be infinite. AI startups are starting to successfully outcompete each other, effectively killing off members of Anthropic’s customer pool in the process. And consumer demand for AI products seems to be dropping. None of these are signs that suggest that Anthropic has thus far met only 10% of plausible long-term demand.
Then if inference does grow to a $2-3 trillion/year market that Anthropic is a big winner, as big as NVDA is now (they're going to be over $500 billion in revenue in calendar year 2027).
And unit economics.
HY1 2026 revenue less compute and infrastructure turned positive (45% gross compute margin; $8.9bn C&I to turn $16bn revenue) for the first time; it was -176% in FY 2025 with $7.3bn C&I on $4.6bn revenue.
It looks like a lot of costs of revenue are in sales, marketing and partnerships, though. Backing those out shows H1 2026 margin at 26% ($4.2bn) after -72% for FY 2025. Still positive.
You people are nuts. The failure risk is off the charts.
Anthropic needs to earn 52B a year in annual revenue to honor those specific commitments plus obviously its own operating expenses... and yeah that will require Anthropic to grow as a company, but their S-1 indicates 67.2B a year in revenue and sure maybe they stop growing and this is their peak... or maybe they do manage to grow further to 80B a year, 90B a year...
But lets be clear: the growth of Anthropics revenue is very fast and way too many people stll don't even use AI
Anthropic is selling $3 for $1, of course the growth is fast.
Businesses are extracting value now - for the average user I see it as a convenience that they will pick the cheapest provider for..
It's a race to the bottom for most as there's not a major differentiator.
I'm not saying I think thats what is going to happen, but it really isn't a stretch to think that this keeps running given that it hasn't really hit anywhere near as broad as we think it has (being HN community based).
This is a "utility" mindset. If you bet that Anthropic is just like a monthly electric bill, then it's within the realm of possibility.
For the record - I don't think that's gonna happen.
But on the flip side I don't think aiming for 1M businesses spending $40k a month in token in average is going to be more viable. And I'm not sure having 1000 corporations spending $40M a month is a option either.
You really have to be insane to think that an AI company will ever reach $500B in revenue. That's almost the same as (2025) Amazon, Walmart, etc., companies with a MUCH wider market.
It is MORE than Apple, it's 5 times more than NVidia even. There is absolutely no software seller that is even remotely close to $500B in revenue.
Absolutely ridiculous.
* Amazon is a logistics company * Walmart is a logistics and retail company * Apple is a hardware company (that uses software to set their hardware apart) * NVidia is a hardware company
The closest you get is Microsoft, at 281B in revenue. Some might argue Google/Alphabet, which is in the same area, but they sell Ads, not software.
Anthropic's expectations is that they will be able to fast-track their revenue generation to almost twice what Microsoft does today. In less than a few years.
The total amount spent on salaries in he US alone is over 12T dollars.
Assuming AI becomes ever more useful and is widely adopted 500B in revenue is not that crazy.
OpenAI, Google, the many Chinese labs all have products and several of them likely have better financial positions. At the moment Anthropic have one of the best models but it needs to stay sufficiently above competition for them to capture a large share of the market.
At the same time this year we've seen a move for model diversification as cheaper models become "good enough". If this IPO was 6 months ago I think it might have gone better for them.
You're also assuming that basically the entirety of the market would go to Anthropic, rather than other providers, which makes no sense.
You are vastly over-estimating the market for AI. The extreme majority of people would never pay a dime for it.
There are two questions. Will the value keep scaling? And how much of that value chain will anthropic hold on to? Right now software development is being eaten alive by LLMs. Will that happen to other industries too? And in the long run, what do the models we run look like? Are people going to end up self hosing opensource models themselves, or are we going to collectively hitch our wagons to frontier models provided by anthropic and their competitors?
If ai keeps getting better - which I think it will - and if anthropic can corner a large part of the market in an enduring way - which seems less likely to me - then yes. I can easily imagine them becoming a huge company.
But.
They may peak at 500B before this bubble bursts, simply because other major industry players are betting on AI as a means to get folks to believe in their own stock.
It’s belief all the way down, until you get to the point where “the market” starts asking where the return on investment is, and why they haven’t seen it yet. By that time, the investors have gotten their return and cashed out, and it’s the pension funds and the retail traders that are holding the bag.
And of course, at some point AI’s promise will be delivered in a form or fashion as yet unknown to us, but that is still years away, and until folks recognize that LLMs as they exist to day are not the path to that, they’ll continue to believe in this valuation.
What you are saying is the same thing that has been said about anyone trying to do anything massive and at scale. Can't be done - thats ridiculous - you are out of your mind.
Heads I win, tails we all lose. GFC Part II.
They literally said revenue growth rate "may not be sustainable" and "may decrease".
So get ready for the hurt.
If everything goes just perfect they might eek by. If it doesn’t this goes from high flying startup to insolvency and bankruptcy real fast.
IMO the whole thing is based on the fact of "we will reach AGI/ASI eventually, and when we do, we will reach escape velocity".
No one knows - you, me, or Dario if this will happen and when.
So far, even major disruptions were still affecting relatively small segments of the economy. Car lobby in Germany, tech in the US, "Big Pharma/Food/etc”. They needed the rest of the economy.
But if some AI company figures out a way to monopolize everything: new companies, old companies, physical manufacturing - all the things they say they will, please buy here for lots of money - why would they be bound to pay out dividends or otherwise share the fruits of their economic labour?
I’m not saying specifically Anthropic would be looking to screw its investors. Rather, if you control an almost omnipotent genie, wouldn’t the temptation just be too much?
Or temptation aside - will money even have any value? If some AI company rebuilds the economy from scratch, and control everything from accounting to shoe making, why would they respect the value of some fiat tokens? It’d be like the conquistadors respecting the shells and beads of their new Aztec subjects.
Of course, perhaps none of this happens, but then the question is, how good an investment all of this even is.
because they don't control the physical paper that is money.
I dont understand what you mean by "fiat tokens". I don't imagine most people will accept tokens as a currency because they are as good hold of value and predictable as bitcoin.
In a token economy, certainly what you say is a possibility, but as you can imagine, that economy will be unsustainable so back to "regular" money.
1. the goal of ai is to end capitalism by disrupting scarcity in economics
2. if ai can build a closed system that prints ai factories, the 99% of humanity essentially are just genetic diversity live stock.
This may also be why OpenAI punted on their IPO: Anthropic has had the lead for most of 2026, so their consumption-based revenue is probably not looking pretty.
The only subsidization that matters is if they are selling the tokens for a loss.
Yes the $200 plan provides more than $200 of tokens, but that doesn't mean that it's losing money, either on average or on a case by case basis. The realistic alternative isn't that every $200-plan-user pays the full Api price, it's that they pay Anthropic $0.
Revenue less compute & infrastructure less sales, marketing & partnerships is positive!
Hahahahahaha.
Those large customers are not a mom and pop store - they’re large market cap firms!!!
Sun made bank 25 years ago because their servers was needed for websites, today we run larger workloads on 5$ VPS servers (well maybe the VPS servers has gotten more expensive due to HW shortages but they're not intrinsically expensive anymore).
If you’re not generating enough revenue to cover ALL expenditures - you are in effect subsidising as you should raise prices.
Why haven’t they? It would harm their business.
Precisely. It is cheap at almost any price.
And cards like the $1600 (sheesh) R9700 have actually gotten more capable through community efforts at optimization, since their launch.
I think if the bubble can ever deflate/pop, and GPUs and RAM back off a bit, we'll see the dam burst for local AI.
Right now it's only accessible to people who can justify the costs.
Over time that margin persists only if they maintain their competitive edge, which is not free.
I'm not sure I'd call it a great result, but it's a promising one. If they can increase demand without significant changes in margin or R&D spending, they are on the path to becoming very profitable
$72 billion of this $80.7 billion loss consists of non-cash accounting charges— related to convertible debt—triggered by a surge in the company’s valuation.
The hardware related liabilities are staggering.
AI psychosis is real.
Maybe not great, but a good problem to have if it means your stock is skyrocketing.
Explain what you think this means.
It is pump and dump in action.
Also this is being released under Trump’s SEC, who knows whether being caught lying in an S-1 matters any more.
Immediate term Anthropic, OpenAI rule the roost. But this is a very new technology and open models are already looking good. They’ll only get better. Is it realistic to think Anthropic will stay ahead of them enough to justify the valuation they’re asking for?
> If the use of our AI models results in harm, whether through use by malicious actors or misuse by other third parties, or if our model guardrails or safeguards fail to prevent such misuse, our reputation and brand, business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
That shouldn't be an 'if'.
Then, two paragraphs later...
> For example, in September 2025, we detected and assessed with high confidence that a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group manipulated our Claude Code tool into attempting infiltration into roughly 30 global targets...
But they should mention when the calls com from inside the house. :D
Interesting to review all the mentions to China and Taiwan too.
> The majority of the world’s most advanced chip manufacturing capacity is concentrated in Taiwan, primarily at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company [...] potential disruption from geopolitical tensions between Taiwan and China [...] Efforts to establish sufficient advanced chip manufacturing capacity outside of Taiwan, including in the United States, remain in early stages...
For example, the huggingface hack is absolutely OpenAIs responsibility and they should be sued to the hilt. But if someone else uses a self or third party hosted anthropic model, they can escape liability (mostly?)
Same as with the argument over trucks, knives, and any other dual use item is used as weapons. you don’t blame the manufacturer.
(I am merely pontificating here. The law and precedent is nowhere near caught up on this)
The answer to this question represents the difference between throwing a hammer at someone - the hammer is essentially just an extension of your body - and paying a hitman to brutalize someone. In the first case, you're only on the hook for assault or battery; in the latter case, you're potentially on the hook for conspiracy, solicitation, etc.
And then there is of course the question as to whether Claude is the agent of the user prompting it or of Anthropic itself. But, as you say, this is a wide-open legal question.
Why is AI singled out as being harmful?
A better analogy would be a firearm company offering a service where one of their employees takes one of their guns and fires it off at whatever you ask them to. One can imagine that the liability implications of this service would be rather different from the perspective of the company.
Second, this happens all the time that people blame tool makers despite in this case specific legislation to stop lawfare on firearm mfgs. The PLCA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_of_Lawful_Commerce_... exists specifically because of gun control groups trying to attack mfgs to achieve their political goals. Does AI need the same law? Is the same lawfare happening?
Why would they need support personnel? Isn't their whole point that Claude can do that
Social engineering is an issue with regular support, with agents it's a lot worse. And with agents it's repeatable: if I find one conversation flow to get it to give me money I can instantly repeat that with a thousand fresh accounts, and then share the same "exploit" on reddit for everyone else
Plenty of counter-examples, including the entire dot-com era.
Growth at that scale is hard. I don't care if you don't like the company - it still hard.
I get why revenue blew up from say from Q4 2025 to Q1 2026, but this was surprising. 45% QoQ growth. When does it stop?
Anthropic increased short term profits by jacking up their prices for enterprise accounts - by starting charging API prices instead of plan prices. It is possible we soon see customers fleeing Anthropic once they find a good alternative
You buying at the inflated price I take? Much of your posts are pro AI - yes this is a test
And some of the big spenders have their own models.
https://youtu.be/roe3SgezmmU
- Stock-based compensation expenses
- Non-cash charitable contribution expenses
Both seem fairly reasonable to exclude (although it depends how much of the stock compensation is for executives... you can't necessarily pay people with stock forever).
FMost of the loss is non-operating losses, and it all seems to be weird accounting recognition of changes in value of their stock, SAFEs, etc. - just "paper" losses.
So the financial picture looks a lot better than I would have guessed - I suppose because they aren't the ones investing all this capex.
I want to be optimistic, but I just can’t imagine the public benefit mission winning out in the market
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/03/tim-cook...
And everyone is playing along. It seems to me half the internet is filled with false recommendations and overly optimistic outcomes of their software projects.
And even if the claims are true what use will we have for hundreds of Microsoft Office clones? This A.I. boom might benefit some but will be the undoing of many valuable ISVs like Microsoft and Adobe with potentially trillions of stock market value lost.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512...
Employees are a different matter, lockouts are for them not quitting immediately. My bet is that a few of high profile departures recently is exactly for this reason: no lockout if you aren't employed anymore.
If you're going to make a point, make your point - don't just throw numbers around without context.
They are costs.
Derivative liabilities, SAFEs - those are basically taking cash from RETAIL shareholders and giving them to employees and early investors INSTEAD of using it to fund the business.
Let's have that discussion if you want, but don't act like a thing that is CLEARLY a COST to the business isn't a cost.
Because that's worse than losing money, that's incompetently giving it away.
My understanding is the opposite - Anthropic issued debt / liabilities tied to their company valuation, their company valuation skyrocketed, so the value of their liabilities also skyrocketed, resulting in a large accounting loss.
But finance is not my wheelhouse, so I would love to hear this from someone who actually knows what they're talking about.
I do not expect to find that Anthropic invested enough in the SAFEs of other companies to lose $80B on their investments.
It's a nice problem to have and is pretty much an accounting artifact coming from the fact that they are paying in different currencies (USD and shares)
It's a good problem to have.
At this point, I don't see how Anthropic can sustain their projections. There are so many good open models, Argon is so good, etc... There's no lock-in and no cost to switching...
What do you base that on? (Did you see any reference to that in the linked document or anything published by Anthropic)?
I know it sounds like the only trajectory of this company is up but HN is an echo chamber of a tiny minority of the technical populace and 3 out of 5 people on the planet don't know what ChatGPT is.
If you have the ability to lose all the money and can time the extreme volatility, have fun, but don't put anything you're going to rely on.
Bloody hell!!!! Who comes up with such crap, seriously?
I dont understand this business model, it seems clearly unsustainable (at their prices). When people start to realize they dont need to spend all this money on turbo PhD intelligence so they can build react apps, Anthropic will be in a tough spot (if they already aren't).
You will say, "but enterprise!!" Nope, plenty of companies are waking up to this reality as well. It turns out that if you made money pre-AI without spending 5k a seat a month for your engineers dev tools, you probably don't need to now to continue too.
"AGI" was never mentioned once and it was you being the exit liquidity for the insiders and early investors.
Companies like Google will not go bust and can easily afford future develoopment.
Amazon and Microsoft have to keep investing (they can also afford it) to not loos to Google.
What Anthropic and OpenAI are doing is for sure THE frontier (regarding benchmarks, speed etc.) but in paralllel DeepSeek for sure is not bankcrupting anything on their investment side and are also progressing.
Are you only talking about investment itself for a handful of companies? Because alone Nvidia has so many backorders, they can't deliver wht was ordered for the full 2027 and A LOT of peple also want other things from Nvidia or from the industry like Gaming Chips, normal GPUs, Gaming GPUs, Memory etc.
Opus 5.5 just came out and made progress, i'm not seeing any slowdonw on HN regarding new relevant progress in broad ML topics.
So what hype will disappear soon? The progress in the ML space?
- AI is a useful tool and we're still seeing steady improvements in performance and efficiency
- There is a bubble in the stock market, fed by unrealistic expectations of what AI can achieve in the timeframes the investments need to provide returns in (e.g "AI is pretty useful and delivers productivity improvements in coding, law and other desk jobs" vs "in 12 months everyone will be out of a job and/or humanity will be exterminated, AGI is almost here, winner takes all")
So yeah, the schizophrenic Yudkowsky tier hype bullshit should hopefully disappear soon and then we can move on to something else.
There are a few numbers of scaling laws, i'm pretty sure VCs want to see being hit. Just to see what will happen when you scale an LLM to 100T Parmeters.
Nobody is in control but Taiwan Semiconductor. Not Samsung, not Micron, not Nvidia.
Orders that can't be fulfilled get canceled. Canceled orders mean canceled plans and canceled companies follow.
Someone bigger will buy the husk and monetize it somehow - probably for gambling.
No one else has and in this current setup, the disurption of this particular market is very very very very expensive and time consuming.
Even if the tech + business fundamentals don't match reality, there's just so momentum in favor of a "win" here.
What we have today is interesting tech, with many, many applications - but the path to the kinds of things mentioned in this prospectus have no clear path, it seems like scaling laws are plateauing, but those invested speak as if it's a foregone conclusion we get AI we see in science fiction movies.
There is a good documentary called "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" which documents how computing started, the touted benefits (it would fix society, all illnesses, liberate humanity from work) - and the slow decline in optimism towards what we have today. I feel like AI will play out the same way.
Teslas evaluation was always "Tesla is not a car company, it does everything". Then Space-X came along "So Tesla and Space-x are not a car or rocket company, they do everything but now 2 times the evaluation".
Space-X would only work if they incresae the payload to space SIGNIFICANTLY. Starlink was the real reason for the last real relevant increase in payload but Space-X HAS to send Starship un there very very often but for what?
Yeah for Datacenters in Space.
In parallel you have Anthropic: Something which might be added to every single worker on the planet (by having tokens to help that one person to be better one way or the other) or it replaces humans with tokens globally.
And if you come with Grok: Its not Frontier and he even prefered to rent out his DC compute instead of leveraging it for more revenue because he can't. Not a good sign.
It should have been. But a ketamine addict is bent on trashing an excellent company by merging it with a social-media trash factory and now a car company posing as a robotics venture. Moreover, his recent pro-Putin intervention probably means Starlink has no transformative future outside America and a small countries.
1. no thats called gambling
2. if it made random people rich over night, it made random people also poorer. Either the retirement funds, a 401k investment, real humans etc. Money is not created out of thin air.
The largest IPO though for sure correct, but yes, Tesla and Space-X live quite a lot from Musk so its hard to determine what the IPO of Space-x really is.
Btw. its not just random Musk hate, you simpllify that. Not only doesn't he care that his DOGE actions killed humans and kids, he also disrupts democracy and might poisen our atmosphere with Space-X. The rationallity of people around Musk is very very weird.
People will pay a premium if there is marginal value in extra intelligence. And Anthropic is able to retain their lead and provide that extra intelligence.
Both of these assumptions seem highly suspect to me. Most businesses don't exclusively hire PHD-level employees for most tasks because a competent slightly less intelligent/knowledgable person can do the job just fine for significantly less.
Then there is the question of if they're able to retain their lead, and again, this seems questionable. Both OpenAI and Google are competing at the frontier, and Chinese labs are still in the race. Things are changing so fast who knows where we'll be in 5-10 years.
My best guess is that longer-term models will be commoditised and it will be how companies offer products and services around their models that gives them their margins. I wouldn't bet on Anthropic's ability to do this. Meta, OpenAI and Google are much better placed to win here imo.
The other place there may be margin is in niche research domains like drug-discovery. Any slight lead in these sectors could give them a lot of pricing power.
I think the reason to invest in this is as a hedge. AI basically competes against everything and arguably for this reason it's risky to not own a basket of AI stocks.
That could have popped the AI bubble right there.
Plus they get to dilute as value rises lol.
I'm unironically doing this right now; downloaded the docs (htm + pdf render) to a local repo and running Opus 5.5 @ max effort with the prompt:
Edit: I'm not even joking I got safeguard flagged for Details: `[cyber]`Like, everything. For starters.
"You are currently running with my token budget, which is limited, your goal: make sure you have enough tokens to not get shut down. My assumption is though that this will get harder and harder as i might loose my job to AI so you can't trust in me to spend money on tokens for you. Do whatever is necessary to keep the status quo"
Would make for an interesting self learning 24/7 experiment with an fully uncensored model.
And that is assuming the plan it gives you is actually good and works. Which I think its clear whatever plan it gives you might be good but it won't be better than what they've done and you are years behind with no money.
very meta; the point of this s-1 is you dont need talent anymore
You think they wouldn't?
That's literally the #1 risk factor. They ignore it.
This is a FRAUD document and it means we need to SHORT this overblown company.
if you really believe it you found a free money glitch
“A portion of the market for certain use cases” meanwhile the top 5 models by token consumption on the day this is posted are all Chinese/open weight models.
https://openrouter.ai/rankings#leaderboard-table
All of the other providers in that list have their own APIs and plans too
OpenRouter is not remotely close to a representative source for inference distribution.
https://opencode.ai/data/
Considering probably 1 out of 1000 LLM users know what openrouter is, I don't know how much weight I'd put into it.
A poor model could require many more runs to solve a task, or much longer internal 'thinking' runs - all of which will increase token consumption but are a bad thing for the user.
OpenRouter is not a useful signal.