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Comment by ketzo | Hacker News Reader

$19B -> $30B annualized revenue in a month?

Feels like the lede is buried here!

All of big tech (except Google obviously) is pushing hard for Claude Code internally. I’m talking “you all have unlimited tokens and we’re going to have a leaderboard of who used the most” kind of push.

"we’re going to have a leaderboard of who used the most"

Yeah I've seen stuff like that and it's a bit bewildering for me. Feels a bit like AWS is new and we're competing to see who can deploy the most EC2 instances.

It’s the crudeness of available management methods at play. Quite exposing for the profession, really (remember lines of code as measure of productivity?).

Also, very very recently they said in a court filing that their lifetime revenue was "at least" 5 billion. Which is it?

Curious - what’s this court filing?

Too lazy to pull up a url, but it was a filing by Anthropic's CFO in the Anthropic v Department of War case.

If your revenue doubles every month, then in the first month where you make $2.5B, your total lifetime revenue has been $5B ($2.5B this month, $1.25B the month before, etc. is a simple geometric series). But your current revenue run rate for the next year will be $2.5B x 12 = $30B.

They're not quite growing that fast, but there's nothing inherently inconsistent between these claims... as long as the growth curve is crazy.

The reality is

1) It's in their interest to distort numbers and frame things that make them look good - e.g. using 'run-rate' 2) The numbers are not audited and we have no idea re. the manner in which they are recognising revenue - this can affect the true compounding rate of growth in revenues

The numbers are certainly audited by their investors. Anthropic isn't foreign to PR talk, but investors know what to look for in their book. They aren't stupid unlike how they are viewed on HN.

There are more investment money than Anthropic need. They can pick and choose.

"The numbers are certainly audited by their investors."

Hahaha.

Mate nobody cares about that nor trusts it. Everyone is waiting in anticipation for the S-1 filing.

I do, and I do trust the numbers. I doubt Anthropic is pursuing fraud given that they already don't have enough compute to serve demand. What is the point of lying to the public, investors and risk going to jail?

Money? Bankman-Fried wasn't the only one.

Their disclosed run rate was 14bn around the time of those filings IIRC, they started showing meaningful revenue around start of 2025, so if you just linearly extrapolate up that would give you ~7bn-ish actual revenue over that period. The more the growth is weighted towards the last few months the more that number goes down

So I don't think those numbers are really in tension at all

Doesn't that beat openai in revenue?

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