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Anthropic Sees over $30T in Potential Revenue
- horse-shot 1mo agoIs it realistic to expect every person on earth to pay them $3,500?
- jstummbillig 1mo agoa) 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.
- mawadev 1mo agoIn fact, we should put an AI Tax on everything you buy, because AI was used somewhere to make it
- jazzpush2 1mo agoI 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.
- waffletower 1mo agoAll my friends know that Sam Altman uses astroturf as carpeting in his office.
- jazzpush2 1mo agoYou 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.
- greenavocado 1mo agoTheir friends control the Central Banks and the printing will continue until $30T buys you a loaf of bread
- christophilus 1mo agoYeah. 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.
- sandeepkd 1mo agoOf 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).
- sixtyj 1mo agoBabies included.
- srini_reddy 1mo agoinstead of 10 years priced in, like what, here 2 generations priced in?
- onion2k 1mo agoThe 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.
- goatlover 1mo agoPut 100% tariffs on everything and drive inflation and trade wars up.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- Brendinooo 1mo agoStretch the timeline out enough and add enough inflation and anything is possible!
- tkahnoski 1mo agoAgree 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.
- ryandvm 1mo agoI'm sure they can extract $3,500 worth of value from everyone's existence.
- curuinor 1mo agoLook. 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.
- interestpiqued 1mo agoHonestly you have a point. The decrease in cost of cocaine is very real
- UltraSane 1mo agoIt would be hilarious if the price of cocaine actually affected macroeconomics because of how it affects human behavior.
- fhdkweig 1mo agoIt 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.
- twic 1mo agoIs there a dataset for this? Maybe a Bloomberg ticker?
- sph 1mo agoMaybe 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.
- ForHackernews 1mo agoYep, 92% of estimated US GDP in 2026. That sounds totally plausible to me.
- garciasn 1mo agoOr ~25% of the world's GDP.
- SiempreViernes 1mo agoIt's just 25 % of world GDP bro, and only slightly more than double the projected worldwide construction market in 2028.
- goalieca 1mo agoIn there is some delusion that LLMs will create hundreds of trillions in new wealth.
- tfrancisl 1mo ago$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.
- ForHackernews 1mo ago"Our Neumann projections show us on track to achieve 15.3 heptillion dollars in annual revenue by the year 2030."
- goatlover 1mo agoData centering the universe is an improvement on paper clips I guess.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- intrasight 1mo agoEchoes of Enron
- karmakurtisaani 1mo ago1 trillion trillion you say?! Sounds ridiculous, but if they can even reach 1% of that target, they'll make a killing! Sign me up!
- burnt-resistor 1mo agoCan be achieved with low/no margin financialization of revenue between a web of companies.
- speedgoose 1mo agoI see myself over $3000T in potential revenues too. You shall see. Please invest.
- fhdkweig 1mo agoMy wang has serious growth potential. https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2000/05/26/this-could-be-big https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2000/05/26/this-could-be-...
- speedgoose 1mo agoThe jokes from the dot-come bubble are back!
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1mo agoWell I’m getting on this train. Even if he comes in under, that’s still like infinity percent growth from current!
- 01284a7e 1mo agoBefore 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.
- rvz 1mo agoNow AI companies are playing with ridiculous Enron-level accounting tricks to justify their already inflated valuations?
- hermitcrab 1mo agoHow else are they going to get rich selling something for a tenth of what it costs them?
- intrasight 1mo agoEnron did it for years and the senior managers became fabulously wealthy.
- AJRF 1mo agoWhat are they currently making?
- ofjcihen 1mo agoIt’s heartening to see that most of HN is starting to call shenanigans on these ridiculous numbers.
- apercu 1mo agoAbout time.
- paulpauper 1mo agoI remember how 3 years ago the consensus, even here, was it was a fad or unsustainable.
- bigstrat2003 1mo agoIt still is unsustainable.
- goatlover 1mo agoYou think $30 trillion projected growth is sustainable?
- lovich 1mo agoAs 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.
- mysterydip 1mo agoSure, the revenue per unit looks bad, but we’ll make it up in volume!
- fuzzfactor 1mo agoWith 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?
- the__alchemist 1mo agoPuts once they IPO
- seydor 1mo agoThat is a typo. It is a Q not a T ! How could we have missed it
- bitwize 1mo agoI'm sure Sam and Dario have a bottle of Cinco Comas sitting on that high shelf...
- misiti3780 1mo agoThey should focus on fixing claude code, as I just canceled my 200/month subscription for codex because it's quality has degraded so much.
- GPerson 1mo agoThey’re focused on curing all cancers in 5 years. Curing claude code is beneath them.
- pluc 1mo agoThe only obstacle is everyone using it for everything
- vesrah 1mo agoOver what period of time?
- spwa4 1mo agoI feel like I'm a comedian saying this, but of course per year.
- HarHarVeryFunny 1mo agoIt's a Feynman path integral - integrated over all possible future trajectories of Anthropic, including those where they have a thriving business on Tatooine.
- the__alchemist 1mo agoThere 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.
- pwython 1mo agoSure there is. You've been able to search/sort/filter/group for a while now.
- the__alchemist 1mo agoWould love to know - how?
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1mo ago2025 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
- 0x70run 1mo ago[dead]
- glimshe 1mo agoThat's awesome! I also predict that Leopold Aschenbrenner will be the world's first trillionaire under 30! PS: Not.
- mmooss 1mo agoAs 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.
- cindyllm 1mo ago[dead]
- theideaofcoffee 1mo agoSo 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.
- TSiege 1mo agoThe 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
- ViktorRay 1mo agoWhen 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.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- throwaway23597 1mo agoHonestly though, if they legitimately achieve RSI, I feel like all bets are off and anything could happen.
- josefritzishere 1mo agoThis is delusional. Are you ready for the biggest short ever?
- cdrnsf 1mo agoAh, so it's not just their products that hallucinate.
- yumraj 1mo agoAccording 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-expected-tell-investors-it-sees-over-30-trillion-potential-revenue-wsj-2026-08-25/ https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/anthropic-exp...
- sixtyj 1mo agoIt is pre-IPO public dance. Today, they offered me shares in Anthropic; the IPO is supposedly scheduled for October.
- keeda 1mo agoThis 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/2dc039762a202b083753b1400452614d https://gist.github.com/danielmiessler/2dc039762a202b083753b...
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- sensanaty 1mo agoIf 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?
- soco 1mo agoI suppose they would still need some goons to help the robotic army push back the rioters.
- zerof1l 1mo agoThe 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...
- IAmGraydon 1mo agoI 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 https://archive.is/iJskQ
- daft_pink 1mo agoWhat will inflation have to be for us to reach that?
- nomendos 1mo agoAs 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.