← Back to context

Comment by simonw

19 hours ago

Dec 3rd 2025: https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-acquires-bun-as-cla... - "In November, Claude Code achieved a significant milestone: just six months after becoming available to the public, it reached $1 billion in run-rate revenue."

Feb 12th 2026: https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-30-billion-s... - "Today, our run-rate revenue is $14 billion, with this figure growing over 10x annually in each of those past three years."

Apr 6th 2026: https://www.anthropic.com/news/google-broadcom-partnership-c... - "Demand from Claude customers has accelerated in 2026. Our run-rate revenue has now surpassed $30 billion—up from approximately $9 billion at the end of 2025."

All three of those are official releases from Anthropic. You can choose not to believe the if you like, but since they plan to IPO this year it's in their interest not to get caught lying to potential investors.

As a non-public company they can use whatever non-GAAP black magic accounting to claim anything while still not technically lying. It just doesn't correlate to anything we'd actually call revenue.

  • It's still notable that, by whatever black magic accounting they are using, their number was $9bn in December and $30bn in April.

    • Not at all, because the magic can be applied differently at different times. They're undergoing a funding run now so they've got a massive incentive to come up with all kinds of revenue.

      They've also signed a deal for billions in compute with xAI for april-may so they're certainly using that to fake billions in revenue using non-GAAP bullshit. It just seems a tad more likely than them legitimately increasing actual revenue by 233% in four months out of the blue.

    • Sorry man I hate to say this but you and many others need to stop commenting on accounting, finance and economics as its clearly way out of your realm of expertise.

      Do you know what revenue recognition is? Do you know what accrual accounting is? Do you know of the phenomenon that is 'managed earnings'?

      The only true objective number in finance is cash flows.