Anthropic is burning roughly $1B a quarter right now, has no clear path to profitability, and is still riding on the same “we’re the safe AI” narrative that’s starting to wear thin as everyone else catches up on safety tooling. Their revenue run-rate is reportedly in the low single-digit billions at best, which would put them at a price-to-sales multiple of 50–100× if they actually hit that valuation. For context, OpenAI at its last round was “only” ~80B on similar (or higher) revenue expectations.
The moat feels increasingly shaky too. Claude is great, but the gap to GPT-4o, Gemini 2, and the open-source frontier is shrinking fast, and they’re still heavily dependent on AWS credits rather than owning their own infra like Google or Meta. At $300B they’d be priced for perfection in a world where perfection doesn’t exist yet.
I’d be shocked if it actually prices anywhere near that. Curious what others think.
The optimistic view is that Anthropic is one of about four labs in the world capable of generating truly state-of-the-art models. Also, Claude Code is arguably the best tool in its category at the moment. They have the developer market locked in.
The problem as I see it is that neither of those things are significant moats. Both OpenAI and Google have far better branding and a much larger user base, and Google also has far lower costs due to TPUs. Claude Code is neat but in the long run will definitely be replicated.
Okay, let’s see you guys get passed the inference costs disclosure. According to WSJ it is enough to kill the frontier shop business model. It’s one of the biggest things blocking OpenAI
> In a statement, an Anthropic spokesperson said: “We have not made any decisions about when, or even whether, to go public.”
They are going public.
Anthropic is burning roughly $1B a quarter right now, has no clear path to profitability, and is still riding on the same “we’re the safe AI” narrative that’s starting to wear thin as everyone else catches up on safety tooling. Their revenue run-rate is reportedly in the low single-digit billions at best, which would put them at a price-to-sales multiple of 50–100× if they actually hit that valuation. For context, OpenAI at its last round was “only” ~80B on similar (or higher) revenue expectations. The moat feels increasingly shaky too. Claude is great, but the gap to GPT-4o, Gemini 2, and the open-source frontier is shrinking fast, and they’re still heavily dependent on AWS credits rather than owning their own infra like Google or Meta. At $300B they’d be priced for perfection in a world where perfection doesn’t exist yet. I’d be shocked if it actually prices anywhere near that. Curious what others think.
The optimistic view is that Anthropic is one of about four labs in the world capable of generating truly state-of-the-art models. Also, Claude Code is arguably the best tool in its category at the moment. They have the developer market locked in.
The problem as I see it is that neither of those things are significant moats. Both OpenAI and Google have far better branding and a much larger user base, and Google also has far lower costs due to TPUs. Claude Code is neat but in the long run will definitely be replicated.
Okay, let’s see you guys get passed the inference costs disclosure. According to WSJ it is enough to kill the frontier shop business model. It’s one of the biggest things blocking OpenAI
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/big-techs-soaring-profits-have-a...