Anthropic's Revenue Is Exploding

Anthropic’s recent press release indicated that their revenue run rate has increased to $30B compared to $9B in December. I’m going to assume that means their revenue in December clocked in at $750M increasing to $2.5B in March. That’s a triple up in just one quarter. And they’re doing this at incredible scale. There are some making noise that Anthropic’s revenue has surpassed OpenAIs, but there comparison isn’t straightforward when the data is sourced from leaks and press releases.

One of the arguments AI bears were hanging on is that the revenue wouldn’t show up. This narrative is going to wither. Enterprise is showing up at Anthropic’s door with their wallets open. Anthropic’s ballooning bank account also indicates that a lot of these data centers are going to find customers. This pokes a hole in the over-built story too.

So where does that leave AI bears?

I think if you want to continue to hold a pessimistic opinion of AI at this point, you still have a few options.

1. Valuations are too rich
2. Models like Claude will not be able to maintain pricing power as models commoditize
3. Model efficiency increases faster than model intelligence increasing the viability of local LLMs and reducing the need to pay for all these tokens

I think all 3 of these are plausible outcomes.