Anthropic revenue jumps to $16.8B in third quarter | Hacker News Reader

Anthropic revenue jumps to $16.8B in third quarter

ft.com

33 pointsorf22 comments

It was supposed to keep growing exponentially, which this is clearly not. This is up 46% from last quarter, which itself was up 140% from the previous quarter. It's growing revenue, but it's not good news for Anthropic.

Makes you wonder how much of q3 revenue growth was early on. And what’s the current MoM growth.

There's a well established phenomena called managed earnings.

That at least explains some of the more panicky blog posts they have been producing.

Any links to the particularly panicky ones?

Here are a few that one might construe as panicky/aimed at soliciting anti-competitive regulation:

https://www.anthropic.com/research/self-replicating-ai

https://www.anthropic.com/research/glm-5-3-and-the-spread-of...

https://www.anthropic.com/research/distillation-defenses

> revenue jumps

> It was supposed to keep growing exponentially

1. Did Anthropic say revenue would grow exponentially?

> This is up 46% from last quarter

2. From googling, their target is 195B for 2028, so they’d need ~15% growth per period going forward to hit that?

There are two ends of the rope pulling the opposite ways. On one end there are companies who are only now starting to onboard on AI and their spend grows. On the other end there are companies with certain maturity who are starting to calculate their spend, put on the limits of employees, explore alternative models with the aim to limit spend.

I think as the pool of new adopters shrinks and the pool of advanced adopters grows, the spending on LLMs will start to fall.

I'm told that Anthropic has been locking enterprise customers into contracts with a mandatory amount of spend in exchange for a minor rebate. I don't know how widespread those contracts are, but either way, my guess is that when they eventually expire, those customers will switch to e.g. DeepSeek for the 80% of workloads that don't need the extra oomph of Opus. I don't know if the numbers at that point will add up to Anthropic surviving. They do seem to be concerned, judging by how hard they seem to be pushing for regulatory capture.

Your understanding is wrong - there is no lock in.

I'm pretty sure it isn't. Or at least I should clarify: Anthropic got some orgs (Honeycomb people mentioned it for instance) on committed spend contracts, which de facto makes using non-/A models unworthwhile since the /A spend is already committed anyway. Which I'll grant you is only functionally the same as lock-in if not quite definitionally.

on the flip side, some early adopters of the tech have been scaling back or removing. Which would both offset gains from new-comers as an increase and also reduces the willingness of people to take the plunge.

There's no doubt AI companies can be profitable and bring value, but anthropic and OAI are horrifically over-valued at the moment, and there is no credible read that currently signals engaging in trade of these companies stock is anything other than engaging in greater fool theory.

Exponentially? On billions of dollars of revenue? That doesn’t sound right.

> It was supposed to keep growing exponentially

Was it? That would've very quickly been all the money in the world

Im thinking of switching to Gemini 4 Argon. I believe google can beat anthropic. Especially since many google customers will have access to AI through their existing deals with google. Why get an extra subscription of gemini is as good or in some cases better.

Does this even cover the interest payments on their loans?

No sweat. Those bonds are going to be converted into equity and dumped on retail investors when they go public.

May I see it?

jesus, at that level of increase I shudder to think how much their expenses had to rise.

The biggest risk for Anthropic is that they have committed to a certain expenditure level. If they are not yet profitable at that time or if they can not raise more they could get into serious trouble.

They are in serious trouble.

The only solid outcome for the powers that be is that VC is allowed to cash out and re-invest it to ensure America stays ahead. Whatever happens to employee shares - who cares.

The gap between China and USA is closing. Im not talking LLMs. Im talking purely about innovation - USA may be technically more creative but China are great a) copying b) latching on and coming up with creative ways to be efficient. Having lots of VC capital with a preference for USA is very strategically important.

I think China is also creative, but plus they have superior ability of industrial manufacturing scalability compared to US.

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