Comment by prolly97

1 day ago

Adding a zero to revenue every year is wild. Regardless of whether you like Anthropic.

That's not so hard when you're also adding zeros to the funding.

  • > not so hard when you're also adding zeros to the funding

    Plenty of counter-examples, including the entire dot-com era.

    • Cisco is definitely not a counter example. They survived, but they could be a template for what will happen to OpenAI and/or Anthropic.

  • 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...

  • 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.

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.

  • 2.2% of U.S. HOUSEHOLDS are subscribed to AI

    • What's the token spend ratio between a household vs a software developer? If the future customer growth comes from regular households I don't think very much of them will spend nearly as much.

    • do we know how much are they paying on average? I just got Gemini Plus that seems sufficient for my family's ordinary usage and it's $37 per year (3 bucks / month). I just don't see the AI companies making any serious money with this type of pricing.

The S-1 is already out of date.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?

  • 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?

    • It does not seem as bad as it sounds like. The numbers are quarter-by-quarter and the market is fluctuating day-by-day basis. To me, growing in this fierce market by 45% qoq seems amazing by itself.

    • 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

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  • > When does it stop?

    Roughly a week after Dario has rung the bell. Note that the growth in absolute sense hasn't peaked yet but the curve itself is already flattening and everybody with some sense for stock prices will read that as a very relevant signal.

    The party that wins here is NV, Anthropic, not so much. But that's good then Dario and his sister can go back to improving the world. Let's hope they take Altman with them.