Anthropic Sees over $30T in Potential Revenue | Hacker News Reader

Anthropic Sees over $30T in Potential Revenue

wsj.com

40 pointscwwc81 comments

Look. This is a new golden age of cocaine, because of the big cuts in everything in the US took away the cocaine busting operations in Colombia and Bolivia, because the revolutionaries that previously kept control of it stood down and became a political party and new, profit-driven cartels came up, and because battery technology means that narcosubs and similar drone things work much better than before (and they can be made remote-operated, so the cops can't do shit even when they find one). Wholesale prices have halved or gone down 60% to like, 12k usd / kilo, street prices commensurate. The huge new opportunities created by increased market size have increased competition and made the cartel nature of the cartels decrease. So always think of that when you look at people acting like this and having such megalomaniac goals.

Honestly you have a point. The decrease in cost of cocaine is very real

It would be hilarious if the price of cocaine actually affected macroeconomics because of how it affects human behavior.

It actually might. It affected the mood of stockbrokers in the 1980s, both because of general energy levels and also because they were addicted and had to keep the money flowing. That must do something to macroeconomics.

Is there a dataset for this? Maybe a Bloomberg ticker?

Maybe in the 80s. I had the insight one day that the past 20 years of tech have been fueled by massive doses of amphetamines, and seen under these lens a lot of products, choices and what has risen to popularity make a lot of sense.

Too bad I don’t take my ADHD prescription anymore and I am now utterly alienated by the work hard not smart crowd.

I don’t really like working with cokeheads. Megalomaniac goals but not the discipline or grasp on reality to achieve them. Always feel like it could be cool to be on a team of cokeheads (and be one) if everyone was truly cracked.

I think whats most important is these numbers don't exist as material goods and they're basically like the african colonies back in the 1700s and 1800s; you could just make shit up because no one of any means was going to come call you on it.

They also sound exactly like the same people, except not describing africans, but the entire world.

I see myself over $3000T in potential revenues too. You shall see. Please invest.

My wang has serious growth potential.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2000/05/26/this-could-be-...

The jokes from the dot-come bubble are back!

Well I’m getting on this train. Even if he comes in under, that’s still like infinity percent growth from current!

$30T? Why not $100T? $1000T? Why not $1 trillion trillion? If we're just pulling numbers out of our asses we may as well go big.

"Our Neumann projections show us on track to achieve 15.3 heptillion dollars in annual revenue by the year 2030."

Data centering the universe is an improvement on paper clips I guess.

Echoes of Enron

1 trillion trillion you say?! Sounds ridiculous, but if they can even reach 1% of that target, they'll make a killing! Sign me up!

Can be achieved with low/no margin financialization of revenue between a web of companies.

Is it realistic to expect every person on earth to pay them $3,500?

a) No. That is not realistic. Some would pay much more, most others way less.

b) If they get $3500 + x in return, why not? The pie is not fixed.

In fact, we should put an AI Tax on everything you buy, because AI was used somewhere to make it

I have completed stopped using Anthropic since Kimi 3 released, and only ever K3 and Codex nowadays. I pay for K3, and get Codex and Claude free from work. Almost everyone I know prefers Codex to Claude.

All my friends know that Sam Altman uses astroturf as carpeting in his office.

You can review my post history to see I'm not astroturfing. I don't know what else to say except continue coping. Try searching 'opus 5' on twitter to see what a shit show that model is.

Their friends control the Central Banks and the printing will continue until $30T buys you a loaf of bread

Yeah. I see this estimate as either A) hot air (my serious take), or B) a dire warning of out of control inflation, or C) a prediction that they'll be a going concern in 500 years when $30T is in fact an average corporate revenue figure if the USD still exists by then.

Of course, we just need to figure out how every person on earth would make at least $7,000 after they loose their job on the name of AI. (Assuming they need at least $3,500 for other basic needs).

Babies included.

instead of 10 years priced in, like what, here 2 generations priced in?

The question isn't whether or not every person pays $3500, but whether or not businesses can extract more than $3500 of value from their interactions with you to make it worthwhile for them to pay.

Put 100% tariffs on everything and drive inflation and trade wars up.

Stretch the timeline out enough and add enough inflation and anything is possible!

Agree with the absurdity. I also had to look at are there other absurd but real things. Estimating at 4.2 trillion in oil revenue is about $500 per person globally. Until you factor in the uneven distribution of that revenue what seems like an order of magnitude problem goes away.

There are of course many other holes to poke in a high level estimate like this.

I'm sure they can extract $3,500 worth of value from everyone's existence.

According to Reuters which refers to this WSJ article [0], $30T is the TAM. Calling it potential revenue is a huge stretch.

Not justifying as this number as it is stupidly large, but theoretically if AI replaced all White collar workers in the World it will come to around $30T or so (Gemini said it’s $36T-$37T based on some calculations using global GDP, labor share, white collar share etc)

TAM is always stupidly large in decks, disconnected from reality. Every startup has a deck with TAM in billions.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/anthropic-exp...

It is pre-IPO public dance.

Today, they offered me shares in Anthropic; the IPO is supposedly scheduled for October.

This source looks at a lot of data sources and numbers and arrives at $50T - 70T annually as salaries for knowledge workers:

https://gist.github.com/danielmiessler/2dc039762a202b083753b...

If it replaces all workers who exactly is spending this 30T when nobody has money? What does money even mean in a world where nobody has a job? Who would even be buying or paying these companies for their AIs in the first place?

I suppose they would still need some goons to help the robotic army push back the rioters.

When all this crashes, future historians will look back and wonder how so many got hoodwinked by AI.

Some of these future historians might even be reading this Hacker News thread.

To any future historians reading this, many of us did know this AI stock bonanza was just a modern day tulip mania. Alas many wealthy people did get hoodwinked though.

2025 revenue numbers:

  - Microsoft $281 billion
  - Apple $416 billion
  - Google $402 billion

Seems likely that a company renting most of their hardware will generate multiples more cash than these established players

Before you dump it, you have to pump it...

In other words, we are to see a media barrage leading up to the IPO to get retail investors to jump on the stock.

The issue with models and Claude in general is that I don’t know anymore what model selection and thinking level are for. When first released, Opus 5 worked well; now it's crap. We have no control or visibility over what is really happening on the other end. You don’t know what is really running on the other end. Our incentives are misaligned: Anthropic gets paid per token - some abstract unit of measure that keeps changing all the time - while I pay for a problem to be solved. So it's Anthropic’s interest to waste as many tokens as possible, producing garbage cheaply.

Opus 5 has been absolutely horrible last couple of days, writing essays of code and comments, fixing one thing, breaking another. Finally switched to GPT 5.6 Sol and Terra, and it's so much better. But I had a similar experience before switching to Opus 4.8, so how long will that last...

As the history rhymes, comparably we're at the mainframe era where limits of the 1st reach of fruitful capabilities could have been possible only with a big investment. Then came PC's and client compute. So, when we achieve mass RAM production and advance few more silicon nodes all within next couple of years, expect next phase of AI on the client with locally running AI (already some are doing it, but at a still prohibitive cost >$5K minimum upward to $20K).

Factor in inflation (which is unusually high and looks to be continuing until productivity effects materialize), so there could be market pricing adjustments/corrections (maybe short crash too, with repricing), although it is an interesting race dynamic where AI is progressing >2x than any previous cycle. In any case AI profits will materialize as they are already materializing at fastest pace than any tech cycle. There could be other re-pricing moments such as amortization/ROI of the AI datacenter cloud-s**. Near-mid term we'll overbuild power and memory production capacity, both harvestable in continuation and will drop price of KWh and GB, while cloud/datacenter buildings will not have such continuation.

So, it is actually easy to see >$30T TAM by ~2030 - buckle up, as that would shake many things and who survives might get to either paradise or hell.

There is still no way to search or filter your list of projects in the Claude sidebar, or get it to show you the active ones.

Sure there is. You've been able to search/sort/filter/group for a while now.

Would love to know - how?

Ah, so it's not just their products that hallucinate.

The only obstacle is everyone using it for everything

Yep, 92% of estimated US GDP in 2026. That sounds totally plausible to me.

Or ~25% of the world's GDP.

It's just 25 % of world GDP bro, and only slightly more than double the projected worldwide construction market in 2028.

In there is some delusion that LLMs will create hundreds of trillions in new wealth.

They should focus on fixing claude code, as I just canceled my 200/month subscription for codex because it's quality has degraded so much.

They’re focused on curing all cancers in 5 years. Curing claude code is beneath them.

As you mock them, notice that they again emotionally provoked the public, using words that disrupt people's feeling of safety and stability and therefore which bypass their cognitive processes and hit directly in their emotions and alarm. That's the goal.

The mocking is usually an attempt to get back some equilibrium, to regain leverage, to make the scary threat into something smaller.

So it looks like their tactic worked yet again. Why is it a goal? One aim is to seize and hold the initiative, and also to make you compliant when they do further transgressive or dangerous things.

I remember how 3 years ago the consensus, even here, was it was a fad or unsustainable.

It still is unsustainable.

You think $30 trillion projected growth is sustainable?

As far as I am aware, they have yet to make a single dollar in profit.

At some point selling a dollar for 5 cents stops being a viable strategy.

Sure, the revenue per unit looks bad, but we’ll make it up in volume!

With how much money has changed hands or has been agreed to do so, aren't the people involved already rich beyond their wildest dreams?

Isn't that one of the most lucrative financial things seen at this scale, and one of its primary characteristics is that it was accomplished without profits?

Who wants to rock the boat anyway by introducing a truly unruly variable like that at this late date?

Over what period of time?

I feel like I'm a comedian saying this, but of course per year.

It's a Feynman path integral - integrated over all possible future trajectories of Anthropic, including those where they have a thriving business on Tatooine.

That is a typo. It is a Q not a T ! How could we have missed it

I'm sure Sam and Dario have a bottle of Cinco Comas sitting on that high shelf...

What will inflation have to be for us to reach that?

Puts once they IPO

What are they currently making?

The combined revenue of the SP500 ~$18.28T, or ~14.8% of global GDP in 2025 (~118.35T). So is anthropic really saying that they expect to have 1.64x the revenue of the SP500 or that the total addressable revenue for AI they suspect is $30T? That number is at least plausible but expect to earn 25% of global GDP is a bit whacky unless you've drunk a lot of koolaid

Honestly though, if they legitimately achieve RSI, I feel like all bets are off and anything could happen.

I have a feeling a lot of people here read the headline, hit the paywall, and had a reaction. This is just the ridiculous estimate of TAM that every IPO contains, and it's always a complete clown show. Uber set their TAM at $6T in 2019. They currently do $50B per year in revenue. SpaceX set theirs at $28.5T on $18B of revenue. These numbers are not to be taken seriously at all. Each claim has to be more outrageous than the last because that, after all, is what they're selling in their IPO.

https://archive.is/iJskQ

Now AI companies are playing with ridiculous Enron-level accounting tricks to justify their already inflated valuations?

How else are they going to get rich selling something for a tenth of what it costs them?

Enron did it for years and the senior managers became fabulously wealthy.

That's awesome! I also predict that Leopold Aschenbrenner will be the world's first trillionaire under 30!

PS: Not.

This is delusional. Are you ready for the biggest short ever?

So I'm guessing that's the same $billion passed around these companies 30,000 times, then, right? If we're just pulling numbers out of thin air, I think I want to make $6723 kajillion dollars this year, and if I don't, I'm going to whine!

This shit is getting so fucking exhausting. No, you're not going to make $30 trillion. Ever. It's second-hand embarrassing how high these idiots are after huffing their own farts.

I hope it crashes and burns -hard-, and the 'wealth' of these insipid billionaire sociopaths 'leading' these operations evaporates so they're just another crank on the street corner so they're easier to ignore.

It’s heartening to see that most of HN is starting to call shenanigans on these ridiculous numbers.

About time.

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