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Probably the bigger headline here is that they’ve blown past OpenAI in revenue and valuation, with OpenAI looking increasingly shaky and vulnerable.
by cmiles8 5mo ago
Probably the bigger headline here is that they’ve blown past OpenAI in revenue and valuation, with OpenAI looking increasingly shaky and vulnerable.
- henry2023 5mo ago“Caballo que alcanza, gana”
- fontain 5mo agoI’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.
- Analemma_ 5mo agoEvery 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.
- newaccountman2 5mo agoWhat he means is the customers realizing they are spending too much on Anthropic.
- claytongulick 5mo agoI 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.
- icedchai 5mo agoI know people at medium size companies where they are tracking AI costs very carefully. They are pulling back to levels under $100/week in AI spend per engineer, encouraging use of lower quality, lower cost models, etc.
- decimalenough 5mo agoI don't doubt you, but $100 is approximately the cost to company of one hour of dev time. If companies end up being willing to spend only 2% of their dev budget on AI, this bubble is not going to last long.
- icedchai 5mo agoI agree. $100/week is absurdly low if you want to allow for any real experimentation and productive use of these tools.
- vidarh 5mo agoYou can run models near 24/7 per developers at that price with judicious choice of subscriptions, so that's not really saying much. Most people don't yet have mature enough setups to fully exploit that level of use.
- icedchai 5mo agoWith open models, perhaps. But $100/week isn't going to get you 24/7 use of Claude Sonnet.
- fontain 5mo agoI 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.
- solenoid0937 5mo ago> 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.
- fontain 5mo agoTokenmaxxing 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.
- solenoid0937 5mo agoOh. I thought tokenmaxxing was just removing token limits
- fontain 5mo agoI think removing limits is fine. There’ll be overspend and at some point adjustments in expectations as we learn more about the value that can be delivered which will likely result in a reduction in spend, but even now, during this period of relative immaturity about measuring the value of output, so long as more tokens = more output, I don’t think the introduction of limits represents much of a risk to Anthropic and OpenAI. Tokenmaxxing is uniquely bad because it is not tied to any additional value (more tokens for the same output). And I could be wrong about tokenmaxxing being a Claude specific problem but as far as I can tell, all of the major companies encouraging employees to maximize their token usage are Claude Code users. And the music has to stop on that at some point, whether because the companies run out of money or because they learn better ways of measuring productivity in the AI age. And if tokenmaxxing is what is driving Anthropic’s lead in revenue, it could be catastrophic to lose that, because Anthropic are spending billions of dollars per month on the infrastructure to support it. If tokenmaxxing is evenly distributed between Anthropic and OpenAI then they’ll both hurt but equal hurt shouldn’t disadvantage either much.
- CuriouslyC 5mo agoUnlike OpenAI, a lot of Claude's infra problems are self-inflicted and not completely raw-capacity related.
- Archonical 5mo agoI 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.
- Gomotono 5mo agoIf you look at the adoption curve of Claude, I don't think we have reached anything near peak.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ignoramous 5mo agoHow? 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.
- cmiles8 5mo agoBecause 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.
- solenoid0937 5mo agoDisagree, both are coexisting fine today.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- claytongulick 5mo agoA series "H" for $65 billion and no path to profitability is existing fine?
- solenoid0937 5mo agoSure, if you think there is even a small chance that OpenAI and Anthropic will get to AGI, it's practically a bargain. They don't seem too far off to me.
- conradkay 5mo agohttps://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/anthropic-says-its-about-to-have-its-first-profitable-quarter/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/anthropic-says-its-about-t...
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- ripvanwinkle 5mo ago[dead]
- alecco 5mo agoAnthropic 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?
- thereitgoes456 5mo agoStargate 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?
- Gomotono 5mo agoStargate 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.
- lumost 5mo agoWhich also leaves OpenAI vulnerable to NVidia's aggressive pricing. To my knowledge Anthropic is relatively well positioned across multiple compute vendors/hardware providers.
- bombcar 5mo agoIsn’t everyone at the mercy of NVidia deciding that everyone has to use NVidAI and refusing to sell anything to anyone?
- abirch 5mo agoIt 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.
- wslh 5mo agoThis 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.
- Aurornis 5mo agoTheir 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.
- cmiles8 5mo agoThe 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.
- baal80spam 5mo agoDo ordinary people really know what Anthropic is?
- __s 5mo agoThey know that "claude's the good one"
- cmiles8 5mo agoThey know the cool kids have ditched OpenAI and now use Claude
- postalrat 5mo agoThey certainly know claude. I keep telling them they are all about the same.
- pembrook 5mo agoIronically 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=Anthropic&hl=en-US https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=... (see the massive spike in January of this year)
- andy_ppp 5mo agoI wonder if being consistently candid is a superior business strategy?
- karmasimida 5mo agoOpenAI 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.
- dbbk 5mo agoThe other player is Google.
- CuriouslyC 5mo agoAnthropic 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.
- hereme888 5mo agoI agree
- kromokromo 5mo agoI disagree. They have been winning lately because of better harnesses and interfaces. New actual decent features are shipped almost weekly on Claude code and Claude desktop.
- outside1234 5mo agoOpenAI has a broken business model
- dyauspitr 5mo agoHaving used Codex though I don’t think OpenAI needs to worry. It’s a solid product and they will share the market.
- outside1234 5mo agoAnthropic is the Google to OpenAI's Yahoo.
- p1esk 5mo agoDo you mean Facebook to Yahoo?
- fsuts 5mo agoOpenAI were perhaps hampered by the Microsoft deal that was just renegotiated allowing them to go onto AWs etc?