Anthropic is riding a hype wave as a result of brilliant marketing. OpenAI has the better products, higher reliability and better community relations. I don't expect the situation to continue.
Their valuations differ by about 13%. That's close enough that I wouldn't call it "blown past".
Things change fast in this space. Anthropic had a big boost from having the premier coding model for a while, but GPT-5.5 has closed that gap at a time when a lot of Anthropic customers are looking for cheaper alternatives.
Anthropic is coming off of a recent change to their enterprise billing that substantially changed the pricing for many users. They were smart to do the fundraising before the effects of that change could fully propagate.
The acceleration rate has been extraordinary… they went from mostly unknown outside AI circles to the number one player almost overnight. If that’s not “blown past” I don’t know what is.
The branding of Claude is so much stronger than ChatGPT. Even Anthropic is such better branding than OpenAI (especially considering they're not open at all).
My wife knows about Claude because that's what I use and we pay for. She uses it also as a result. And inevitably she will talk about Claude to her friends.
Ironically their tussle with the US federal government is what made them a household name [1]
There's no better way to create awareness of a brand than to get it featured in the most popular reality TV show globally at the moment: "Thing Trump Did: Season 2."
OpenAI isn't shaky or vulnerable, this market will need at least 2 players.
I see most of the surge here comes FOMO AI spending which will have to be dialed down later half of the year, otherwise those companies will have to layoff to fund their AI bill, which is harmful to their business.
Anthropic grabs its bag at the peak, but feast is over.
Anthropic is at the mercy of 3rd party datacenter contracts. AFAIK OpenAI will soon run mostly on on their own GPUs.
I don't like Altman and I am still upset about his memory deal last year but he prepared for the current shortages months before anybody else. Meanwhile, Anthropic seems to lack any plans besides third party contracting. IMHO they got very lucky with xAI and Google having spare capacity and willing to rent it. But what about next year?
Which also leaves OpenAI vulnerable to NVidia's aggressive pricing. To my knowledge Anthropic is relatively well positioned across multiple compute vendors/hardware providers.
It also leaves OpenAI vulnerable to any GPU breakthroughs. You could imagine company X comes up with a XPU that is 100% faster than what's currently there.*
Stargate as a project is real, they only stoped the Stargate UK thing.
Anthropics relativ longterm contract with xAI def shows that they can fill the capacity vs Musk not. OpenAI and Anthropic are both using a lot of capacity so its fair to say that this is an advantage.
If they stay very close competitive (which they are), your own datacenter does reduce token price.
How? OpenAI and Antrophic are basically the Big 2 racing away at light speed; the others who can't get near them are perhaps shaky & vulnerable. And sure, there's a garden full of those.
Because the market almost certainly can’t support two foundation model labs given the increasingly little difference across models and the massive sums of cash required to keep it all going. There is no big 2, just a race to survive and be the big 1.
There's at least two markets here. Consumer ad driven and worker augmentation markets. Likely a 3rd as a backend infrastructure provider to a bunch of value add companies.
I think Google has caught up enough to certainly be a player in the consumer ad driven market.
I also don't think only one foundation model adds up. Now that the trail is blazed a dozen companies can likely make a good enough model. The question is if there's a moat to make it winner take all
It probably can't support any because there's no moat and smaller, open source models are catching up. This is like investing $1T into mainframe computers in 1980.
This business and financial race is probably the craziest in human history, so zig-zags are expected. One company may take advantage on one curve while another is stuck in the pits.
I’m not so sure. We only need to look at Uber’s example of companies realizing they’re spending way too much and trying to rein it in. Claude has excellent revenue but it is highly dependent on very rich technology companies continuing to spend lavishly without seeing returns. The music will stop at some point and Anthropic will be hit the hardest. OpenAI may have less revenue but it is distributed across many, many more customers and use cases, it’s resilient. And even if Anthropic do, somehow, manage to keep their customers spending huge amounts on Claude, they’re very vulnerable to being undercut by OpenAI given codex is pretty much at parity. Anthropic seems more vulnerable to me.
I think it's somewhat guaranteed that the music will at least die down a little bit. We saw this with cloud companies being bitten by cloud cost optimization initiatives. I can't imagine we won't see the same with AI, especially as the workforce stops trying to tokenmaxx to save their role.
Every week there's at least one post on the HN front page bitching about API errors from Claude because Anthropic doesn't have enough serving capacity. I really don't see any signs they're "spending too much", the actual evidence on the ground seems to be exactly the opposite: constant exasperation that they're not spending enough.
I just finished talking to a dev manager friend of mine at a household name company.
He told me they are massively pulling back on the AI stuff.
Right now the lashback is about cost, because that's the most easily measured pain point.
Soon, we'll start seeing a deeper understanding of the quality issues. At that point, it's likely this whole experiment gets firmly put in a bin of the toolbox where it belongs.
I mean Anthropic’s customers are spending too much on Claude. Anthropic’s customers are encouraging tokenmaxxing amongst their employees; measuring employees by token usage. That’s great for Anthropic’s short term revenue numbers but terrible long term because at some point companies will realize tokenmaxxing is not good. OpenAI is much less exposed to tokenmaxxing, which is a good thing.
Tokenmaxxing is the practice of measuring employees by how many tokens they use, encouraging employees to burn tokens needlessly, it is unrelated to what agents can do.
If a task can be completed with 100k tokens but employees are considered better performers if they complete it with 500k tokens instead… that’s unsustainable and cannot possibly benefit Anthropic in the long term.
At some point, Amazon and Uber and so on and so forth are going to realize that actually, employees using 100k tokens or even 50k tokens is better than 500k and Anthropic’s revenue will fall off a cliff.
As someone who knows admittedly knows nothing about startup funding rounds, how many more rounds of funding can they do before an IPO? Is it effectively infinite?
Going off the other reply, I wonder if a highly-active secondary market means that companies can raise series [A-Z]+ rounds effectively forever, where each "round" just refers to a giant purchase of shares under strict company supervision. Is this the new game for startups?
I can't speak for the specific case of Stripe, but it's fairly common for private companies to have a "tender offer" in which employees have the opportunity to sell some portion of their equity. This is often done in conjunction with a new investment round.
I believe Databricks series L round raised $4B in late 2025, but earlier this year they raised another $5B so technically they've maybe completed series M round and are "on" series N round now? The press releases are a bit confusing to me.
It's semantics, but the latest raise might have been a follow-on to Series M, not a new round (to be clear, I know nothing about their finances, just speaking from experience at another company).
I imagine there are ways for existing investors to achieve liquidity while still raising venture funding. But an IPO is "the" liquidity event and I imagine there will be pressure from investors for that.
I also imagine that venture funding rounds have a lower ceiling than the public markets - but at these rounds I'm not so sure!
usually you would go through seed funding, the series a,b, and possibly a1 and b1. If you entered c or d territory it meant that you still had a chance but vc would be following you very closely. After d, you could raise money, but it would be under very unfavorable conditions
they can do as many as they want. but at some point investors need/want to exit their positions and push for an IPO. That point is different for every company.
Anthropic has a great product, but what's going on in the stock market is astonishing. Companies waiting to be valued at a trillion dollars before going public? (I'm writing this comment with the assumption that they will go public soon and the valuation will be higher than this $965 billion dollar private valuation) The stock market used to be a place for companies to raise money from investors. But that isn't what it is anymore, it's a dumping ground. Venture capitalists & private investors are sucking all of the possible growth and future upside from these companies and then dumping them on retail investors when there's nothing left. There is no growth or upside left by the time these companies go public. If you invest in these IPOs you are buying the absolute peak with all potential future profits baked into the price, with nowhere left to go but down.
Yeup, no shortage of tech IPOs over the past five years that are now valued at like 5% of what they were after being dumped onto the market: ZoomInfo, Bumble, Gemini
And many more that are 50% of what they were: Snowflake, Coinbase
And many more that went back to private companies and then were sold off: Carbon Black, etc...
I'm actually too lazy to go list out all of them.
But employees, beware, of those gnarly lockup periods post IPO where all the better classed options than yours get to exit.
> Venture capitalists & private investors are sucking all of the possible growth and future upside from these companies and then dumping them on retail investors when there's nothing left.
A lot of the money that is deployed by VCs comes from pension funds and asset managers that ultimately manage money for the average Joe.
Say you join Anthropic now as an employee. What are the chances of your equity appreciating in value? I don't think we have any historical precedents to this.
This did round involve a secondary? If yes, any data to suggest that these secondaries are leading to increased spending outside of housing and propping up the local economy?
They eventually stop, Excel has a max column size of 16,384. Not sure what letter combo that would be (ZZZZZZZZZZ or something?), but it does eventually halt.
That announcement is a bit short on details. I suppose that, like in the previous rounds, there are some strings attached and they'll not get all of it at once.
Hynix is participating with a new circular deal. Hynix is also valued at $1 trillion now, which is positively insane.
This scam will implode harder that the housing bubble.
The circulation of money in AI is deeply troubling (NVIDIA being one of the worst I believe), either the bubble doesn’t pop and corruption like this is considered legal (self-inflating money amongst friends) or it pops and the financial hurt will be felt for a decade.
Revenue up to $47B. Looking forward to the Ed Zitron hot take on this one! No doubt he will fling more baseless accusations of fraud and other nonsense.
This has become a meme which is way out over its skis. Yes, run-rate is not the complete story, but "impossible to interpret" is way overstating the case.
Probably the bigger headline here is that they’ve blown past OpenAI in revenue and valuation, with OpenAI looking increasingly shaky and vulnerable.
Anthropic is riding a hype wave as a result of brilliant marketing. OpenAI has the better products, higher reliability and better community relations. I don't expect the situation to continue.
I agree
Their valuations differ by about 13%. That's close enough that I wouldn't call it "blown past".
Things change fast in this space. Anthropic had a big boost from having the premier coding model for a while, but GPT-5.5 has closed that gap at a time when a lot of Anthropic customers are looking for cheaper alternatives.
Anthropic is coming off of a recent change to their enterprise billing that substantially changed the pricing for many users. They were smart to do the fundraising before the effects of that change could fully propagate.
[delayed]
The acceleration rate has been extraordinary… they went from mostly unknown outside AI circles to the number one player almost overnight. If that’s not “blown past” I don’t know what is.
I remember seeing expensive multi-page ads for Claude in the New Yorker over a year ago.
Their marketing has been working the high end of the “regular people” market for a good while.
The branding of Claude is so much stronger than ChatGPT. Even Anthropic is such better branding than OpenAI (especially considering they're not open at all).
My wife knows about Claude because that's what I use and we pay for. She uses it also as a result. And inevitably she will talk about Claude to her friends.
Do ordinary people really know what Anthropic is?
They know that "claude's the good one"
They certainly know claude. I keep telling them they are all about the same.
They know the cool kids have ditched OpenAI and now use Claude
Ironically their tussle with the US federal government is what made them a household name [1]
There's no better way to create awareness of a brand than to get it featured in the most popular reality TV show globally at the moment: "Thing Trump Did: Season 2."
[1] Proof: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=... (see the massive spike in January of this year)
OpenAI isn't shaky or vulnerable, this market will need at least 2 players.
I see most of the surge here comes FOMO AI spending which will have to be dialed down later half of the year, otherwise those companies will have to layoff to fund their AI bill, which is harmful to their business.
Anthropic grabs its bag at the peak, but feast is over.
Anthropic is at the mercy of 3rd party datacenter contracts. AFAIK OpenAI will soon run mostly on on their own GPUs.
I don't like Altman and I am still upset about his memory deal last year but he prepared for the current shortages months before anybody else. Meanwhile, Anthropic seems to lack any plans besides third party contracting. IMHO they got very lucky with xAI and Google having spare capacity and willing to rent it. But what about next year?
Which also leaves OpenAI vulnerable to NVidia's aggressive pricing. To my knowledge Anthropic is relatively well positioned across multiple compute vendors/hardware providers.
It also leaves OpenAI vulnerable to any GPU breakthroughs. You could imagine company X comes up with a XPU that is 100% faster than what's currently there.*
* NVidia GPU, Google TPU, Apple SoC, etc.
The same 3rd party datacenters from the same few companies that everything else runs on? If there's demand, hyperscalers will supply.
Stargate is not real.
It is not clear that running one's own datacenter is a competitive advantage. Why do you think OpenAI can handle that?
Stargate as a project is real, they only stoped the Stargate UK thing.
Anthropics relativ longterm contract with xAI def shows that they can fill the capacity vs Musk not. OpenAI and Anthropic are both using a lot of capacity so its fair to say that this is an advantage.
If they stay very close competitive (which they are), your own datacenter does reduce token price.
How? OpenAI and Antrophic are basically the Big 2 racing away at light speed; the others who can't get near them are perhaps shaky & vulnerable. And sure, there's a garden full of those.
Because the market almost certainly can’t support two foundation model labs given the increasingly little difference across models and the massive sums of cash required to keep it all going. There is no big 2, just a race to survive and be the big 1.
There's at least two markets here. Consumer ad driven and worker augmentation markets. Likely a 3rd as a backend infrastructure provider to a bunch of value add companies.
I think Google has caught up enough to certainly be a player in the consumer ad driven market.
I also don't think only one foundation model adds up. Now that the trail is blazed a dozen companies can likely make a good enough model. The question is if there's a moat to make it winner take all
China will make sure they have a frontier lab, there's plenty of chance for Google to catch up once the compute crunch gets more serious.
Disagree, both are coexisting fine today.
A series "H" for $65 billion and no path to profitability is existing fine?
It probably can't support any because there's no moat and smaller, open source models are catching up. This is like investing $1T into mainframe computers in 1980.
isn't Google going to win the race anyway ?
If it cant support two competing compamies, something is very wrong. Oligopoly is bad, monopoly worst.
Well functioning market is supposed to have many, as in a lot, companies with similar products. To create competition.
Google likely has its market share too, you can track how fast Cloud revenue increased.
I wonder if being consistently candid is a superior business strategy?
This business and financial race is probably the craziest in human history, so zig-zags are expected. One company may take advantage on one curve while another is stuck in the pits.
“Caballo que alcanza, gana”
I’m not so sure. We only need to look at Uber’s example of companies realizing they’re spending way too much and trying to rein it in. Claude has excellent revenue but it is highly dependent on very rich technology companies continuing to spend lavishly without seeing returns. The music will stop at some point and Anthropic will be hit the hardest. OpenAI may have less revenue but it is distributed across many, many more customers and use cases, it’s resilient. And even if Anthropic do, somehow, manage to keep their customers spending huge amounts on Claude, they’re very vulnerable to being undercut by OpenAI given codex is pretty much at parity. Anthropic seems more vulnerable to me.
I think it's somewhat guaranteed that the music will at least die down a little bit. We saw this with cloud companies being bitten by cloud cost optimization initiatives. I can't imagine we won't see the same with AI, especially as the workforce stops trying to tokenmaxx to save their role.
If you look at the adoption curve of Claude, I don't think we have reached anything near peak.
Every week there's at least one post on the HN front page bitching about API errors from Claude because Anthropic doesn't have enough serving capacity. I really don't see any signs they're "spending too much", the actual evidence on the ground seems to be exactly the opposite: constant exasperation that they're not spending enough.
What he means is the customers realizing they are spending too much on Anthropic.
I just finished talking to a dev manager friend of mine at a household name company.
He told me they are massively pulling back on the AI stuff.
Right now the lashback is about cost, because that's the most easily measured pain point.
Soon, we'll start seeing a deeper understanding of the quality issues. At that point, it's likely this whole experiment gets firmly put in a bin of the toolbox where it belongs.
I mean Anthropic’s customers are spending too much on Claude. Anthropic’s customers are encouraging tokenmaxxing amongst their employees; measuring employees by token usage. That’s great for Anthropic’s short term revenue numbers but terrible long term because at some point companies will realize tokenmaxxing is not good. OpenAI is much less exposed to tokenmaxxing, which is a good thing.
> at some point companies will realize tokenmaxxing is not good
Why? Have we figured out the limits of what agents can do?
> OpenAI is much less exposed to tokenmaxxing
I don't think this is true, from my own experience & chatting with my acquaintances.
Tokenmaxxing is the practice of measuring employees by how many tokens they use, encouraging employees to burn tokens needlessly, it is unrelated to what agents can do.
If a task can be completed with 100k tokens but employees are considered better performers if they complete it with 500k tokens instead… that’s unsustainable and cannot possibly benefit Anthropic in the long term.
At some point, Amazon and Uber and so on and so forth are going to realize that actually, employees using 100k tokens or even 50k tokens is better than 500k and Anthropic’s revenue will fall off a cliff.
Oh. I thought tokenmaxxing was just removing token limits, my bad.
What is this, Series for ants? It barely covers Andrej's sign-on bonus.
As someone who knows admittedly knows nothing about startup funding rounds, how many more rounds of funding can they do before an IPO? Is it effectively infinite?
Effectively infinite. Databricks is a good example. They're still private after 13 years and closed a Series L round last year. Stripe is similar.
Having been through an IPO before, it was good for employee liquidity, but bad for the culture and long-term success of the company.
Dead capital. There's no need for public funding until they are reasy to cash out at the top, if ever.
How do investors cash out? Do they sell to new round investors?
Going off the other reply, I wonder if a highly-active secondary market means that companies can raise series [A-Z]+ rounds effectively forever, where each "round" just refers to a giant purchase of shares under strict company supervision. Is this the new game for startups?
Correct. There is also a secondary market.
so how do stripe employees get liquidity? can anyone sell their secondary shares?
Bankruptcy court?
FTX bought 8% of Anthropic for $500m in 2021.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/josipamajic/2026/03/18/ftx-owne...
I can't speak for the specific case of Stripe, but it's fairly common for private companies to have a "tender offer" in which employees have the opportunity to sell some portion of their equity. This is often done in conjunction with a new investment round.
Tender offers.
https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba...
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/tender_offer
https://carta.com/learn/equity/liquidity-events/tender-offer...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
(secondary markets are sometimes an option, depending on stock transfer restrictions)
Private/secondary markets.
Stripe might buy back the shares at a good price. They might be able to sell on secondary markets.
Once they reach series Z does it go back to A or do we get a new format like AA, AB ?
I believe the canonical example is Databricks on round L
I believe Databricks series L round raised $4B in late 2025, but earlier this year they raised another $5B so technically they've maybe completed series M round and are "on" series N round now? The press releases are a bit confusing to me.
It's semantics, but the latest raise might have been a follow-on to Series M, not a new round (to be clear, I know nothing about their finances, just speaking from experience at another company).
I imagine there are ways for existing investors to achieve liquidity while still raising venture funding. But an IPO is "the" liquidity event and I imagine there will be pressure from investors for that.
I also imagine that venture funding rounds have a lower ceiling than the public markets - but at these rounds I'm not so sure!
usually you would go through seed funding, the series a,b, and possibly a1 and b1. If you entered c or d territory it meant that you still had a chance but vc would be following you very closely. After d, you could raise money, but it would be under very unfavorable conditions
they can do as many as they want. but at some point investors need/want to exit their positions and push for an IPO. That point is different for every company.
Depends on the investors if they see growth. The downside is dilution. Preferably they just want the Series I as the IPO in this case.
They cannot raise forever, SpaceX has done more rounds but the timing is most important.
Yes, whatever you like
Anthropic has a great product, but what's going on in the stock market is astonishing. Companies waiting to be valued at a trillion dollars before going public? (I'm writing this comment with the assumption that they will go public soon and the valuation will be higher than this $965 billion dollar private valuation) The stock market used to be a place for companies to raise money from investors. But that isn't what it is anymore, it's a dumping ground. Venture capitalists & private investors are sucking all of the possible growth and future upside from these companies and then dumping them on retail investors when there's nothing left. There is no growth or upside left by the time these companies go public. If you invest in these IPOs you are buying the absolute peak with all potential future profits baked into the price, with nowhere left to go but down.
Yeup, no shortage of tech IPOs over the past five years that are now valued at like 5% of what they were after being dumped onto the market: ZoomInfo, Bumble, Gemini
And many more that are 50% of what they were: Snowflake, Coinbase
And many more that went back to private companies and then were sold off: Carbon Black, etc...
I'm actually too lazy to go list out all of them.
But employees, beware, of those gnarly lockup periods post IPO where all the better classed options than yours get to exit.
> But that isn't what it is anymore, it's a dumping ground.
We got "dumped" Google and Facebook, so... Those probably made up for all the other "dumps".
We also got "dumped" TSLA, which is meme-ing in the trillions at the moment.
You can short Anthropic at IPO if you want...
Google IPO 20 years ago, Tesla 15 years ago, facebook almost 15 years ago.
Situations change.
When did they change? Because when Facebook IPO'd everyone was saying the stock market was a dumping ground.
Maybe but can you elaborate what the changes are?
> Venture capitalists & private investors are sucking all of the possible growth and future upside from these companies and then dumping them on retail investors when there's nothing left.
A lot of the money that is deployed by VCs comes from pension funds and asset managers that ultimately manage money for the average Joe.
Is there any evidence of what is the share/volume of such assets involved?
So close to being the first kilocorn. A unicorn = 1 billion, this is almost 1k.
Hasn't SpaceX achieved that though?
And Saudi Aramco before they IPO'd
Kibicorn has a nicer ring to it ($1,024 billion).
Say you join Anthropic now as an employee. What are the chances of your equity appreciating in value? I don't think we have any historical precedents to this.
Well presumably nobody investing in this current round expects anything less than a 3x
inflation
I suspect we'll have our first $10T company in the next 2-3 years. That's only doubling.
This is all getting a bit tiring. Show us the S1 already!
This did round involve a secondary? If yes, any data to suggest that these secondaries are leading to increased spending outside of housing and propping up the local economy?
They're going to run out of letters pretty soon.
Anyone in finance should know that excel doesn't run out of letters (for columns) either. It just rolls over to AA, AB, etc.
They eventually stop, Excel has a max column size of 16,384. Not sure what letter combo that would be (ZZZZZZZZZZ or something?), but it does eventually halt.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/excel-specificati...
Boys we got more subsidy for Claude Code Plans! Let the VC financed spending of 1000$ of datacenter cost for 200$ sales price continue!
great point. i haven't gotten over losing the Uber subsidy!
That announcement is a bit short on details. I suppose that, like in the previous rounds, there are some strings attached and they'll not get all of it at once.
Hynix is participating with a new circular deal. Hynix is also valued at $1 trillion now, which is positively insane.
This scam will implode harder that the housing bubble.
The circulation of money in AI is deeply troubling (NVIDIA being one of the worst I believe), either the bubble doesn’t pop and corruption like this is considered legal (self-inflating money amongst friends) or it pops and the financial hurt will be felt for a decade.
nice, that's another 4 years of spacex data center usage runway!
I'll have some of that joint they be smokin'
/s
Revenue up to $47B. Looking forward to the Ed Zitron hot take on this one! No doubt he will fling more baseless accusations of fraud and other nonsense.
*run-rate revenue
Without more information, this number is impossible to interpret.
This has become a meme which is way out over its skis. Yes, run-rate is not the complete story, but "impossible to interpret" is way overstating the case.
With all that revenue, while being the most expensive model, they are still unprofitable without trickery.
This really doesn't paint the good picture you seem to imply.
Unless you have access to Anthropics book your claim is as baseless as Ed Zitron's ...
What do they then need another $65B for? To sell 200$ plans that cost them 1000$ to fullfill.
I can have $47B in revenue if I sell something that cost $80B to produce ez pz.
Revenue is not profit.
This is likely the last fund raise before going public.
You can't spell Anthropic or OpenAI without "IPO". You can remove the "c" in anthropic, reverse it and the first 3 letters is "ipo".
But you certainly can spell both of them without "AGI".
Therefore, "AGI" is a complete scam and it actually was meant to be a giant IPO.
you also can't write openai without a pen
Airtight logic
Some new form of mystic numerology/gematria-based investment logic?
I think your conclusion might be right that AGI does just feel a bunch of hype but the reasoning in middle feels flawed...
like how 13^2=169 and 31^2=961 or 10^2+11^2+12^2=13^2+14^2
9k karma, whew