Wild although not entirely surprising. Congrats, Anthropic.
Tech stocks with all the hype are second only to crypto in terms of how easy and fast are to sell (hence BTC dropped and now tech stocks IMHO).
Btw, I was too young to fully remember, but wasn't the year before the dot com crash also full of IPOs?
If you give me $1T to spend, I, too, can probably make $14B (this is a metaphor)
Citation needed.
That isn’t nothing.
These are all moats.
Source??
seems like there are a lot of those out there these days, and the costs are falling
> a massive concentration of talent and experience
Apparently 3000 employees? There's plenty of talent to be found elsewhere. Plus employees can be hired away.
> brand
meh.
> one of, if not the best, coding experiences
Seems easy enough to replicate, given how quickly they built it.
Valuation behemoth OpenAI has been forced by the market to use Anthropic standards a couple times, having no comparable solutions of their own.
… I can see it.
https://www.thesaasnews.com/news/databricks-raises-1b-series...
This was in the middle of the boom when companies were fighting over talent, so I found it odd.
My sense is that startup mission statements are ~meaningless. Builders try to build great things that lots of other people will find valuable.
Google used to have a motto "don't be evil"
Who enforces the definition of language? Who demands compliance?
Soon as we go down the path of policing and insistence on one true dogma, we veer into religious holy war type behavior.
Obsession with semantics of syntax is a sort of theism even if the syntax and semantics do not refer to the commonly accepted tropes of a specific religion.
But I guess it's easier to make a glib comment than look these things up.
Beat OpenAI. The Founders came from OpenAI so there was obviously some disagreement about the direction there or they simply wanted more control.
But project out forwards.
- What happens when Google builds a similar model? Or even Meta, as far behind as they are? They have more than Anthropic in cash flow to pour into these models.
- What happens when OSS is "enough" for most cases? Why would anyone pay 60% margins on inference?
What is Anthropic's moat? The UX is nice, but it can be copied. And other companies will have similarly intelligent models eventually. Margins will then be a race to the bottom, and the real winners will be GPU infra.
+ r&d costs
Of course, if one does not "pay" for investment, benefits are easily made ..
SaaS and legal market caps have already contracted a multiple of the combined OpenAI + Anthropic valuations just based on the _threat_ of what they may be able to accomplish.
They'll have the data + knowledge edge over open alternatives and be able to implement + deploy (see the story about Anthropic employees being at GS for 6 months already[0])
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/anthropic-goldman-sachs-ai-m...
Two years ago, I considered investing in Anthropic when they had a valuation of around $18B and messed up by chickening out (it was available on some of the private investor platforms). Up 20x since then ...
It was always obvious that Anthropic's focus on business/API usage had potential to scale faster than OpenAI's focus on ChatGPT, but the real kicker has been Claude Code (released a year ago).
It'd be interesting to know how Anthropic's revenue splits between Claude Code, or coding in general, other API usage, and chat (which I assume is small).
Until the funding stops for one reason or another and then everyone loses all their money at once like a star that collapses into a black hole singularity in a femtosecond.
In my opinion though this is a race to the bottom rather than a winner takes all situation so I don't think anyone is coming out ahead once the dust settles.
No comment on Google+, Google has a storied history of failure on any kind of social media/chat type products.
Where Google wins is just simply having enough money to outlive anyone else. As the saying goes "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" In this case, Google is the market and they can just keep throwing money at the wall until OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. go under.
And there was collaborative editing long before Google Wave.
Google makes money selling ads. Nothing else matters.
chromeos is 17
android is 18
chrome is 18
google docs is 20
google translate is 20
So maybe Google is lagging on truly new products (btw, does Gemini itself with its TPUs count as a new product? I'd say yes), but "old" products are entrenched enough to carry them and compete.
Google does things I hate with their products. But the money printing machine keeps going whrrr faster and faster.
They're engaged in computing research and merely engage in consumer capitalism as a consequence of political and social constraints.
Products are a means to an end not the goal.
OpenAI and Anthropic are product companies and are more likely to fail like most product companies do as they will lack broad and wide depth.
Google has experience in design, implementation, and 24/7 ops with every type of SaaS there is. They can bin LLMs tomorrow and still make bank. Same cannot be said for OAI or Anthropic.
Look to GCP as an example. It had to be done, with similar competitive dynamics, it was done very well.
Look to Android as another.
Some of the Big Techs are building their own in house stuff (Meta, Google), but it wouldn't be crazy to see acquisitions by the others, especially if the market cools slightly. And then there's the possibility that these companies mature their revenue streams enough to start actually really throwing off money and paying off the investment.
I wouldn't argue it's that risky. Look at their past entanglements:
1. Google Default Search Bribe - brings in $20B a year for literally doing nothing
2. Google Maps: Google let them build their own custom app using Google's backend, and it worked fine all the way up until Apple chose to exit that arrangement
actually I can't think of any others, but is there an example of Apple getting burned by Google?
Some technical advancements are not worth it if you do not respect your users.
OpenAI figured this out: it’s awesome marketing when people send each other links to the app with a convenient text box to continue the conversation. It’s viral.
Google meanwhile set this up so that “anyone with the link can view” is actually “anyone with the link and a Google account”.
That’s grade A failure of marketing.
The PM in charge of that decision ought to be walked off a plank.
It’s the new kids in the block that will make the difference.
You know those lists on twitter about how many companies US has in top 10 and are presented as a win? Those are actually lists of capital concentrations blocking innovation. It looks like US is winning but for some reason life is better in EU and innovation is faster in China.
It’s companies like OpenAI Anthropic that will move US ahead. Even if some core innovation or and capital comes from the establishment.
NVIDIA, and contractors who build data centers, and manufacturers who supply them, will all get rich.
As measured by prosperity life in the US is better; the poorest US state has a higher GDP per capita than most western European countries. Americans have bigger houses, more food, bigger cars, bigger salaries, and access to better medical care and schools if they've got an okay job. Most Europeans are lucky to make $40k/year post-tax. And America is still winning on innovation because its AI models are ahead of China's both in benchmarks and in user preferences. How many people do you know professionally who use a Chinese model and agent framework instead of e.g Claude Code or OpenAI Codex?
As millipede, clearly therefore millicorn.
What if their strategy is this: slowly drive down software stocks, keep talking about AI, buy the downward market. Then cash in on the IPOs of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Then let OpenAI and Anthropic implode. Goldman Sachs had no problems underwriting webvan at the end of 1999, which then imploded in 2000.
Anyway, I just valued my dog at $1 billion post-money. You can buy it at pets.com.
Because we live in the worst possible timeline the end result for AI companies does seem to be "too big to fail", where these massive investments will get foisted on working class people via a bailout or an IPO and index inclusion.
verdverm•2h ago
wonder how much of that $30B will make it their way and pay that down