The AI industry has been unusually nervous this week. I’d like to claim credit for that but it was The Financial Times that got hold of Anthropic’s quarterly revenue figures from a private investor meeting: the company is making an obscene amount of money, growing at an obscene rate, and yet investors are panicking.
Anthropic has realized that if you promise the stars the Moon won’t suffice.
But let’s hear the numbers first.
$16+ billion revenue in a single quarter and 46% QoQ growth. Holy. Both figures are unprecedented for such a young company at this stage. Together, they might be unprecedented in history (maybe Apple). Not to mention the reported ~$74B in run-rate revenue. Anthropic is a beast of a business; not even OpenAI is that high.
What’s the problem then? Why are investors complaining about the GOAT? Because everything is unprecedented in AI, and so “unprecedented revenue” is not enough.
By the way, TickerTrends nailed it in the chart below. I did, too: “It only takes some finite amount of time to turn a prideful exponential into a disappointing sigmoid.”
What do you mean you are growing only 46% QoQ? It was 145% last quarter! What do you mean your exponential revenue has turned into a sigmoid? I don’t care if half the SP500 is losing value, you were the chosen one! When the entire American economy unambiguously rests on the tech industry which in turn rests in the AI industry, which in turn rests on Anthropic’s IPO being successful, any bad news is terrible news.
Anthropic is not allowed to slow down even a bit because, like Atlas, the world rests on its shoulders. Isn’t that what you wanted, Dario? Don’t you fail us now—where’s that country of geniuses in a datacenter, let me see it! In November 2025, I wrote that OpenAI was “too big to fail.” I meant that 1) the government wouldn’t let it fail but also that 2) were it to fail, everything would fail with it.
The same rationale applies to Anthropic now, which took the role of industry lynchpin from OpenAI this year. Tragically, it’s failing to rise to the occasion.
Naive extrapolations suggest Anthropic will fall short of its $100B run rate revenue target. Q4 must see an unlikely re-acceleration of revenue growth if they want to appease investors. Most likely, though, it will keep plateauing. I don’t think Fable 5.5—Anthropic’s ace up the sleeve, coming very soon—can move the needle; which use cases will it unlock that Opus 5.5 didn’t? That’s the key question: is the marginal gain from a new model enough to put the company back into exponential growth?
I just don’t see it.
Suddenly, the $2 trillion valuation that some of Anthropic’s backers are hoping for at IPO seems too much. As do the $518 billion in infrastructure commitments it has made for the next decade (80% non-cancelable). It also seems bad that the AI boom is the biggest in history, above railroads, dot-com, canals, etc.
Thankfully, as Dario Amodei said in a Summit in December, he is “pretty confident they’ll have the revenue at the right time.”
For Anthropic, exponential growth isn’t celebration but the bare minimum!
Am I perhaps being too demanding?
Listen, they said AI will soon change everything (recursive self-improvement by 2028—no, by 2027!), and so the market has updated accordingly. It will measure this unprecedented boom against an even more unprecedented set of expectations.
Anthropic’s revenue numbers are one sign among many that the bubble might be closer to popping than anyone thought. But there are many others.