Anthropic S-1

Everything comes back to whether the demand is really there. Anthropic thinks it is. The got the demand / datacenter match right in Q2, got great margins, and committed hard. They've got: - $114b committed to Google - $110b committed to AWS - $161b committed to Broadcom - $120b committed to SpaceX If the party continues, they'll go from $50b in revenue to $500b and be fine. But if they don't, it's going to hurt. And that's their only choice, because otherwise, they end up with a frontier model and 50% of the capacity and get eviscerated on either availability or last-minute datacenter leases. It's a big business, but it's not an easy business.

The killer app is AI coding. Claude Code had first mover advantage, was a genuine revolution, and has diffused through the industry with incredible speed. I would imagine most of the huge revenue increase over the last year is due almost entirely to AI coding spend. There are three issues with this. First, the rapid diffusion of the technology means it is very unlikely to continue at the rate of adoption seen over the past year, so it's very hard to extrapolate based on what we've seen so far. Second, many companies are reigning in AI budgets after an initial honeymoon phase. Third, all of the other labs are trying to take a bite of the coding pie, and the price war is already heating up. Add these simple dynamics up and it makes perfect sense why Anthropic would want to IPO now. Things look about as good as they ever will.

Personally, I hope the Anthropic IPO fails. I'm exhausted with the constant harassment by Anthropic on developers and open source. I don't trust Dario one bit and don't trust anyone who trusts him.

Ant generates $2.08 in revenue for every $1 spent on compute which is up from just $0.40 in Q1 2025.the payback period for compute is just insane, likely less than a year!

There are three mentions of “open source” and none of them mention open source models as a fundamental risk to their business. Interesting. UPDATE: seems like it is under "open-source" and "open-weight". Woops. Will keep this up simply because I do think the OS (and infra-managed OS services) provided by Chinese labs is a considerable risk to the underlying business, at least with enterprise R&D.