literally what is the upside? They're supposedly worth as much as meta despite having nowhere near the customer base or years of work? How much more valuation do they have to trick people into giving them before investors get a return?
Anthropic hit 9 billion ARR in Dec 2025 and 80 billion in Oct 2026.
Meta hit 9 billion in 2014 and 80 billion in 2020. It is now at 250 billion.
At this growth rate Anthropic will be bigger than Meta already next year.
Caveats: It's hard to believe that this growth rate would continue. And Meta's numbers above are trailing 12 months, while Anthropic's are annualized run rate.
> Anthropic hit 9 billion ARR in Dec 2025 and 80 billion in Oct 2026
This is a bit misleading and based on projections of prior reported months. Growth has already slowed, Q3 in dollars was less than Q2. The timing aligns largely with the growth (since mid-summer) of open weight models.
Since they actually have paying customers, it's a completely different sort of thing than for Meta. The question is instead whether they can keep at the frontier, whether the compute they've signed up for is good enough, etc.
I think this is down to how investors think about how to value a piece of a company. I think about it almost the same way as I think about sports gambling.
There's a value proposition in which direction the stock is going to go and how long it's going to take to get there. It only makes sense to be invested in a stock if you think it's going to be worth more later than it is now and the amount of time your money is tied up in this stock is commensurate with the profit you may get as a result.
Investors work on limited information about companies, and having a track record can influence a buying decision one way or another. It may matter to some investors and not to others. For many, it's weighed against the price of the stock. Would you bet $100 on a company with a short track record? What about $10,000, $100,000, or more? Generally there's a point where people drop out of buying more of a stock and say that they can't justify the risk given the information they have. That's the expected value that Anthropic will receive from that investor.
Anthropic needs to worry about what that number is for a huge amount of individual investors and how to maximize the amount of money put into the cost of their stocks, and there's very little chance that they can attract the biggest pool of investor money without some of those people considering their longevity vs a more established company like Meta. It may not matter to all investors, but the fact that it will matter to some makes it a factor in the total valuation.
Possibly speaks to its moat being weak, if a dedicated team from scratch can duplicate their efforts and get to where they are today in 2 years (but not where they will be).
Because building a stable revenue base takes time. We've had many flash-in-a-pan type product but things which still make money 10 years later are rare.
"I don't pay to get rid of ads, so I get bottom-of-the-barrel scam products hoisted at me. This is AI's fault, somehow, and not how the web has worked since nearly its inception."
My first online scam attempt came via uucp. I think it has always been this bad. There have been waves of effectiveness in combatting it.
A comparatively few bad actors can have a disproportionate impact on the lives of many people. Prior to the internet we had https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_von_Braunhut, although that probably pales in comparison to Richard DeVos.
My first was Green Card Lawyers (edit: technically just spam, not a scam). The scale and sophistication of scams today is orders of magnitude higher than it was in the 90s.
I am from New Zealand, the marketing for stupid Sea Monkey kind of scams were quite visible growing up.
They were all overflow from targeting an American audience. There was no way for a kid in NZ to actually get money to them to be scammed.
In that way it's similar to a lot of the AI scams now, not actually a risk for most people, just poluting the space in which they exist,
Paying to get rid of ads on Youtube (which keeps getting more expensive) doesn't negate that they're almost entirely scams now. He's commenting on what he's seeing. AI has supercharged scams and you know that.
Yeah a lot of people bought into the idea of CUDA being a moat but we’re well past the point where it’s pretty trivial to jump to another equivalent stack on the software side.
Those are the two main interfaces: the inference hardware and the endpoints. Endpoints are pretty much standardized to the point that you can switch them out in seconds. CUDA still has an edge but every release like this chips away at that. Even so, TPUs are unobtanium so while I appreciate Google's effort here I also recognize that it is not something that will be useful to me.
In that sense AMD is still better positioned to give NVidia a run for their money but given the family connection and AMD's underdog status I am not very hopeful that we'll see meaningful competition in inference hardware any time soon.
NVidia is a much harder nut to crack than OpenAI or Anthropic. They are easily a decade ahead of viable competition. Check out the GB300 if you don't believe that.
While I have the same sentiment, I am also curious why a competitor can't accelerate their developments with AI. In the end, hardware development is to a large extent also software development. Is it the patents that NVIDIA has that are preventing this? Or maybe some trade secrets? AFAIK the NVIDIA hardware is manufactured entirely by TSMC.
Google does provide TPUs to big players like Anthropic and other large enterprise customers for on prem deploymens. That's their target just like those the GB300 is aimed at.
Even if it's allegedly possible, the devil has always been in the details. It always sucks to find out that there's some quirk of your model architecture that breaks an implicit assumption that underpins the export process.
This is a terrible suggestion. Rolling your own auth nowadays is like rolling your own encryption. It’s just a bad idea. OAuth and OIDC are massive specs that are constantly changing and you’re going to be stuck chasing and developing auth instead of your actual product.
I know because this is what my brain dead principal engineer did and I’ve spent the last 3 years chasing RFCs and am now going to spend the next year migrating to Keycloak because I’ve finally convinced my boss that we’re not an auth company.
I agree you shouldn't write every line by hand, you should use libraries, but pretending like OAuth/ODIC require using something like Cognito/Auto0 is just silly. An LLM can crank out the needed code in very little time and give you full control over your auth instead of fighting an auth provider at every turn.
The number of compromises something like Cognito requires are just not worth the perceived gains.
I really whole heartedly disagree and if you think it’s silly I think that you don’t really fully understand the complexity of it. An LLM doesn’t solve everything. You still need to understand the spec, become a domain expert, and design your solution for the parts that the RFCs leave open with undefined behaviour. At the very least if this is your opinion you should start with an open source solution like Keycloak or authentic and fork it if you really need “control”.
I already said that using a library (open source) is a good idea, I just don't think we need to pretend that Auth is so complicated that we need a third-party provider. I don't buy that argument. You should not roll your own low-level code, you should never need to even look at the RFC's, just hook into the Auth library you use (library, not service).
> just hook into the Auth library you use (library, not service).
I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how this stuff works. You can't "just use a library". Your identity server is a service, open source or not and you have to align to how they do things.
I'm talking about handling the OAuth token exchange and what not. Your identity server doesn't need to be a separate service, it can be integrated into your backend. At the end of the day it's responsible for making sure client claiming to be X is X. I really don't think this is rocket science.
I've set up email/password, email magic links, SMS 2FA codes, OAuth, and it's never been this magical, mystical thing these "auth providers" want to pretend it is.
Yes, you need to wire up endpoint for you to feed data to the library (tokens), and provide ways to refresh tokens, etc but that's all just wiring up and I don't think that's really that hard (even before LLMs).
I just cannot fathom handing over as much control and third-party auth providers require you to.
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