It's interesting that Amazon don't appear interested in acquiring Anthropic, which would have seemed like somewhat of a natural fit given that they are already partnered, Anthropic have apparently optimized (or at least adapted) for Trainium, and Amazon don't have their own frontier model.
It seem that Amazon are playing this much like Microsoft - seeing themselves are more of a cloud provider, happy to serve anyone's models, and perhaps only putting a moderate effort into building their own models (which they'll be happy to serve to those who want that capability/price point).
I don't see the pure "AI" plays like OpenAI and Anthropic able to survive as independent companies when they are competing against the likes of Google, and with Microsoft and Amazon happy to serve whatever future model comes along.
Anthropic is burning roughly $1B a quarter right now, has no clear path to profitability, and is still riding on the same “we’re the safe AI” narrative that’s starting to wear thin as everyone else catches up on safety tooling. Their revenue run-rate is reportedly in the low single-digit billions at best, which would put them at a price-to-sales multiple of 50–100× if they actually hit that valuation. For context, OpenAI at its last round was “only” ~80B on similar (or higher) revenue expectations.
The moat feels increasingly shaky too. Claude is great, but the gap to GPT-4o, Gemini 2, and the open-source frontier is shrinking fast, and they’re still heavily dependent on AWS credits rather than owning their own infra like Google or Meta. At $300B they’d be priced for perfection in a world where perfection doesn’t exist yet.
I’d be shocked if it actually prices anywhere near that. Curious what others think.
The optimistic view is that Anthropic is one of about four labs in the world capable of generating truly state-of-the-art models. Also, Claude Code is arguably the best tool in its category at the moment. They have the developer market locked in.
The problem as I see it is that neither of those things are significant moats. Both OpenAI and Google have far better branding and a much larger user base, and Google also has far lower costs due to TPUs. Claude Code is neat but in the long run will definitely be replicated.
Most of the secret sauce of Claude Code is visible to the world anyway, in the form of the minified JavaScript bundle they send. If you’re ever wondering about its inner workings you can simply ask it to deminify itself
The missing piece here is Anthropic is not playing the same game. Consumer branding and larger user base are concerns for OpenAI vs Google. Personal chatbot/companion/ search isn’t their focus.
Anthropic is going for the enterprise and for developers. They have scooped up more of the enterprise API market than either Google or OpenAI, and almost half the developer market. Those big, long contracts and integration into developer workflows can end up as pretty strong moats.
most of the secret sauce of Claude Code is visible to the world anyway, in the form of the minified JavaScript bundle they send. If you’re ever wondering about its inner workings you can simply ask it to deminify itself
1. Sounds like exactly when early investors and insiders would want to cash in and when retail investors who “have heard of the company and like the product” will buy without a lot of financial analysis.
2. A 300bn IPO can mean actually raising n 300bn by selling 100% of the company. But it could also mean seeing 1% for 3bn right? Which seems like a trivial amount for the market to absorb no?
Okay, let’s see you guys get passed the inference costs disclosure. According to WSJ it is enough to kill the frontier shop business model. It’s one of the biggest things blocking OpenAI
It's interesting that Amazon don't appear interested in acquiring Anthropic, which would have seemed like somewhat of a natural fit given that they are already partnered, Anthropic have apparently optimized (or at least adapted) for Trainium, and Amazon don't have their own frontier model.
It seem that Amazon are playing this much like Microsoft - seeing themselves are more of a cloud provider, happy to serve anyone's models, and perhaps only putting a moderate effort into building their own models (which they'll be happy to serve to those who want that capability/price point).
I don't see the pure "AI" plays like OpenAI and Anthropic able to survive as independent companies when they are competing against the likes of Google, and with Microsoft and Amazon happy to serve whatever future model comes along.
> In a statement, an Anthropic spokesperson said: “We have not made any decisions about when, or even whether, to go public.”
They are going public.
Anthropic is burning roughly $1B a quarter right now, has no clear path to profitability, and is still riding on the same “we’re the safe AI” narrative that’s starting to wear thin as everyone else catches up on safety tooling. Their revenue run-rate is reportedly in the low single-digit billions at best, which would put them at a price-to-sales multiple of 50–100× if they actually hit that valuation. For context, OpenAI at its last round was “only” ~80B on similar (or higher) revenue expectations. The moat feels increasingly shaky too. Claude is great, but the gap to GPT-4o, Gemini 2, and the open-source frontier is shrinking fast, and they’re still heavily dependent on AWS credits rather than owning their own infra like Google or Meta. At $300B they’d be priced for perfection in a world where perfection doesn’t exist yet. I’d be shocked if it actually prices anywhere near that. Curious what others think.
The optimistic view is that Anthropic is one of about four labs in the world capable of generating truly state-of-the-art models. Also, Claude Code is arguably the best tool in its category at the moment. They have the developer market locked in.
The problem as I see it is that neither of those things are significant moats. Both OpenAI and Google have far better branding and a much larger user base, and Google also has far lower costs due to TPUs. Claude Code is neat but in the long run will definitely be replicated.
Most of the secret sauce of Claude Code is visible to the world anyway, in the form of the minified JavaScript bundle they send. If you’re ever wondering about its inner workings you can simply ask it to deminify itself
The missing piece here is Anthropic is not playing the same game. Consumer branding and larger user base are concerns for OpenAI vs Google. Personal chatbot/companion/ search isn’t their focus.
Anthropic is going for the enterprise and for developers. They have scooped up more of the enterprise API market than either Google or OpenAI, and almost half the developer market. Those big, long contracts and integration into developer workflows can end up as pretty strong moats.
most of the secret sauce of Claude Code is visible to the world anyway, in the form of the minified JavaScript bundle they send. If you’re ever wondering about its inner workings you can simply ask it to deminify itself
> Claude Code is arguably the best tool in its category at the moment. They have the developer market locked in.
I am old enough (> 1 year old) to remember when Cursor had won the developer market from the previous winner copilot.
Google or Apple should have locked down Anthropic.
If they had, they would have killed it.
Google should be stomping everyone else but it's ad addiction in search will hold it back. Innovators dilemma...
Cursor still wins over Claude Code because Cursor has privacy mode
1. Sounds like exactly when early investors and insiders would want to cash in and when retail investors who “have heard of the company and like the product” will buy without a lot of financial analysis.
2. A 300bn IPO can mean actually raising n 300bn by selling 100% of the company. But it could also mean seeing 1% for 3bn right? Which seems like a trivial amount for the market to absorb no?
> A 300bn IPO ... raising 3bn
Would be so massively oversubscribed that it would become a $600bn company by the end of the day (which is a good tactic for future fund raising too).
I suspect if/when Anthropic does its next raise VCs will be buyers still not sellers.
AGI will become IPO and everyone will forget and move on.
Okay, let’s see you guys get passed the inference costs disclosure. According to WSJ it is enough to kill the frontier shop business model. It’s one of the biggest things blocking OpenAI
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/big-techs-soaring-profits-have-a...
Do you mean as part of going public they need to make public how much they spend on inference versus how much they make?