That kind of insane growth & demand is unprecedented at that scale.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/google-broadcom-partnership-c...
I presume I'm not the only one.
My hypothesis is that companies dont want to offer cheaper nor better services. Only want to cut costs and keep the revenue for investors.
I other news, TQQQ is pretty high!
And yet.. building shit is no longer the sole domain of the software engineer.
That's the sea change.
I've literally had finance and GTM stand things up for themselves in the last few weeks. A few tweaks (obviously around security and access), and they are good to go.
They've gone from wrangling spreadsheets to smooth automated workflows that allow them to work at a higher level in a matter of months.
That's what all this AI is doing. The shit we could never get the time to get around to doing.
Given the fact that both Altman and Amodei are pathological liars, there's absolutely no reason to believe that Anthropic has $30B ARR.
(I would then argue that he was re-hired because others involved with OpenAI understood that it is literally his job to lie and that OpenAI would not be where it is today as a corporate behemoth rather than a research non-profit, without a world-class liar marketing it, but that is merely conjecture.)
Can you explain how that’d work? What would the $30B figure be based on if they only have $100 in revenue?
(Run Rate = Revenue in Period / # of Days in Period x 365)
(That said, their numbers are much realer than that.)
But all progress points to a commodification of foundation models--Google first named it as "we have no moat, neither does anyone else." So there must be some secondary play driving this, right? Hardware sales? Hedging for search ad revenue?
Still feels mispriced. I think asset inflation leaves too much money desperate for the Next Big Thing.
Although I doubt this will stop them if they think it’s advantageous…
US law here is nuanced. Good quick primer https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
As long it further's American interests globally - monopoly is fine. Other countries need to take notice and start picking winners nationally in order to compete with the large American big tech firms.
couldn't this just be framed / spun as just using search data as training? i don't seem being bundled enough to run afoul with anti-trust.
Running at a loss long enough to kill the competition is basically the name of the game these days.
When Uber started, they were basically setting VC money on fire by selling rides at a loss to destroy the taxi market.
Now, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.
This is why SpaceX could be a dark horse in this race. Putting compute in space is expensive but so is building a data center in the US.
You know what's also really hard in a vacuum? Dissipating heat.
Correct. The economics of space-based DCs basically comes down to permitting delays versus radiator mass. At ISS-weight radiators (10 to 15 W/kg), you need almost decade-long delays on the ground (or 10+ percent interest rates) to make lifting worthwhile. Get down to current state-of-the-art in the 5 to 10 W/kg range, however, and you only need permiting delays of 3 to 5 years.
If there is a game-changing start-up waiting to be built, it's in someone commercialising a better vacuum-rated radiator.
I really couldn't have been more obscure, could I? :P
In 1932, "the first oil field in the Persian Gulf outside of Iran" was discovered in Bahrain [1]. (The same year Saudi Arabia announced unification [2].)
In the end, Saudi Arabia had larger reserves and wound up geopolitically dominating its first-moving rival. In commodities, the game tends to be scale in part through land grabbing. Less who got where first.
To close the analogy, if AI does wind up commoditised, the layers at which that commodity is held are probably between power and compute [3]. So if AI commoditises (commodifies?), Google selling computer (and indirectly power) to Anthropic and OpenAI is the smarter play than trying to advantage Gemini. (If AI doesn't commoditise, the opposite may be true–Google is supercharging a competitor.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahrain_Petroleum_Company
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_of_the_Kingdom_of...
[3] The alternate hypothesis is it's at distribution.
> In September 2025, Google is in talks with several "neoclouds," including Crusoe and CoreWeave, about deploying TPU in their datacenter. In November 2025, Meta is in talks with Google to deploy TPUs in its AI datacenters.
The amount of new revenue that I am personally able to create for my clients, using Claude models for dev, and Claude models inside the insanely agile products delivered, is astounding.
If I was not currently experiencing this myself, and someone told me that this was possible, I would be calling them names.
anthropic is the anchor external customer of tpu's and nvidia is worth more than all of google. If tpu's actually breakout as a viable alternative over the next few years for multiple clients the business could easily be worth as much as search, maybe more.
Why haven't they broken out yet, I wonder, if they're more efficient for inference and LLM costs are now weighted towards inference over training?
The tech is great but valuations are out of control. It's cheaper to keep valuations high through these circular financing deals, rather than to allow for any deflation.
What's the explanation behind this? I am sure they use AI in their ad network (matching web sites with ad offerings, maybe generating ads automatically), but is there more to it?
What are you counting in this category?
My neighbors just gave Ford $60k. It'll be a while until my neighbor gives Anthropic $60k.
How much of that 60K does Ford actually keep? And how much will it be once BYD is allowed in the US? The forecast for Ford is pretty much only downwards, the possible upside on AI is huge.
If every company in the F500 starts spending $2000+ on AI credits per employee, then every consumer product will indirectly be funding AI companies. I think it's already the case that companies small enough to avoid/skip getting O365 or Google Suite subscriptions will pay for AI first.
And it may very well be bad news for OpenAI.
OpenAI crashing would be good news and bad news for Anthropic investors.
And with cashback through gcp usage!
It's more understanding for Amazon or Microsoft to make such an investment, because they're not as competitive in the model space.
Google buys Anthropic.
Microsoft buys Open AI (or vice versa depending on how things go).
SpaceGrok buys Cursor, limps along in 3rd place.
Meta is the last man standing, get's stuck with Oracle, dies.
Edit: I forgot Amazon. Who knows what they will do. They're the wildcard anyway.
Anything to invigorate the desktop.
Microsoft buying OpenAI.. 10 minutes later it's rebranded Copilot.. and.. nothing much changes in the world. Oh, except all the AI improvements are around Enterprise governance.
I don’t know what to make of it
"Attention Is All You Need" was a very very different thing and I also wonder if they are glad they published it. But I imagine if they hadn't, the motivation for researchers to leave Google would have been even larger.
if it runs of out of cash - then it's bad for the whole industry.
same as OpenAI. so all players - will provide cash & compute to keep them going.
Why? I don’t think we would suffer if anthropic disappeared tomorrow
Didn't Amazon AWS do the same recently?
this is insane. on the secondary market the valuation is 2-3x that. what gives?
Google's deal from prior rounds likely lets them buy in at the same valuation other investors get every round, so they're just getting the February valuation.
Amazon did almost the same thing last week, at the same valuation.
If you gave anthropic 10b cash they couldn't get chips in the 0-6mo timeframe at scale. Anthropic is suffering reputational damage due to choices they have to make around capacity constraints.
Google, AWS, and Azure are the only people who can help them so they hold the cards, thus the good terms.
Correct. But I think $5 to 10bn are sitting ready for $700 to 800, which strongly implies Google is getting a solid deal on this.
It is not uncommon to keep a round open after the formal announcement for a bit so that few investors who could not close for whatever reason are part of it. It can be hard to line up everyone at the same time, especially when they are public companies.
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Specific to your point on why valuation can be lower than market at the same time - Goods(and stocks) while feel to be homogeneous, divisible, fungible, they are not. Size can value of its own.
A block of 10% shares may be worth more (or less) than unit share price, because them being available together has a property of its own, making it either more desirable when someone wants to acquire or harder to sell because there is not enough demand if all of them get dumped at the same time [1]
In this deal terms, just cause few ten millions are trading at $850B, or some investors can put in say $1-2B doesn't mean you can raise $40B at the same valuation.
There isn't depth in the market to raise $65B (including the AMZN deal) at $850B valuation. There is always some demand at any price point in the demand supply curve, you will probably find few people who will buy few shares at $10T, or $100T or some ridiculous number but that doesn't mean you can raise a large round on that.
Strictly speaking it is not even $350B per se, i.e. Google and AWS benefit from this as vendors. It very much like vendor financing with convertible debt. Meaning it is worth that much to them, but not to you and me because we are not getting some of the money back as sales that boosts are own stock.
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[1] In the same vein, price can also depend on what you are getting in return, hard immediate dollars is the highest value. However if you are getting shares in return, you can usually negotiate a premium depending on risk of the shares you are getting.
The recent SpaceX - Cursor deal is a good example, any founder would likely take say $10B all cash offer over the $60B from SpaceX, or price would be closer to cash if it GOOG, AMZN, APPL shares instead - proven deeply liquid market etc.
I don’t think that’s the ultimate cause of the turnaround in fortunes. But it strikes me, at least from the investor and potentially urban-consumer perspectives, as a pivotal moment in both companies’ fortunes.
Ant's recent rise has little to none to do with retail subscribers, it is Claude Code with Opus 4.5+, followed by their Mythos stunt
I would say the flood of $20 Claude Subscribers due to news cycle backfired on them, now everyone is getting worse outputs and exposed their shortage on compute, which they can't fix anytime soon.
Pretty much everyone I know has both cc and codex now, just because how unreliable cc has become.
This is a good hypothesis. I suspect we are both correct.
The PR boost from Anthropic standing its ground drove signups. That, in turn, drove investors. But the users also drove utilization, which degraded quality across the board.
My hypothesis rests on Anthropic’s user mix having significantly shifted to consumers (versus enterprise) after the mix-up. Whenever we get public numbers it would be interesting to test that.
I think it was psychological to a degree. For many consumers OpenAI, or at least ChatGPT was AI. The controversy was enough for folks to be introduced to competitors in the AI space and suddenly OpenAI's success felt a lot less inevitable.
I agree with OP though that this won't actually be the cause of OpenAI's downfall, should it happen. But I still think it's an interesting inflection point.
This is true. OpenAI WAS the story of AI, now it is just 50% of it, at max. Losing the monopoly of imagination towards AGI is bad for them.
One thing I don't agree though, consumers aren't the important part of AI, they are a liability.
AI is too expensive, consumers can't pay for it. Instead they will compete with enterprise for the same tokens, with less money.
This is my suspicion. Consumers hadn’t previously heard of Anthropic and Claude. Now they had, particularly in cities.
> this won't actually be the cause of OpenAI's downfall, should it happen. But I still think it's an interesting inflection point
Also agree. Hence why I said “I don’t think” the fight is “the ultimate cause.”
Of course this is part of what has lead to such insane demand and outages they've experienced since then.
lol hes barely done anything, but sometimes that is all that's necessary when a bozo opponent is hell-bent on screwing things up. He didn't get fired the first time for no reason.
Sure. Neither OpenAI or Anthropic do. Amazon and Google have followed institutional investors bidding up Anthropic over OpenAI in private markets, all of which—I suspect—followed user-pattern shifts following the fiasco. (Well, fiascos. Altman is a host unto himself.)
Individually, yes. Anthropic surging in private markets the weekend after the supply-chain risk designation, and raising from not only Google but also Amazon in such short clip (following credibly reports of it turning down $800+ billion valuation cheques from financial investors), all while OpenAI gets pilloried in the press and struggles to hold its $800bn valuation in private markets, collectively—to me—paints a bigger picture.
Wat?
I guess to address the point, having a problem with Hegseth isn’t the same as having a problem with Trump. And given some of Trump’s administration is embracing e.g. Mythos, it seems unfair to characterize Dario v. Hegseth as anything broader.
There was a recent moment when OpenAI went from the uncontested darling of consumer and investing America, to being second place to Anthropic. It happened rapidly, and I saw it at least on the investor side in the weekend after the supply-chain risk designation. (Disclosure: that’s also the week I signed up for Claude, in part out of protest, but mostly to see what the fuss was about.) I think there is a lesson for anyone working with startups or in tech from this example—it may be one of the most violent strategic sea changes I’ve seen in a while.
I really like HN's system of flagging versus banning. Like, I genuinely mapped TDS to Trump Derangement Syndrome, something I wasn't doing before because I thought it was a joke versus something his supporters thought of seriously.