YHK - yet another hacker news clone

very meta; the point of this s-1 is you dont need talent anymore

Teslas evaluation was always "Tesla is not a car company, it does everything". Then Space-X came along "So Tesla and Space-x are not a car or rocket company, they do everything but now 2 times the evaluation".

Space-X would only work if they incresae the payload to space SIGNIFICANTLY. Starlink was the real reason for the last real relevant increase in payload but Space-X HAS to send Starship un there very very often but for what?

Yeah for Datacenters in Space.

In parallel you have Anthropic: Something which might be added to every single worker on the planet (by having tokens to help that one person to be better one way or the other) or it replaces humans with tokens globally.

And if you come with Grok: Its not Frontier and he even prefered to rent out his DC compute instead of leveraging it for more revenue because he can't. Not a good sign.

It should have been. But a ketamine addict is bent on trashing an excellent company by merging it with a social-media trash factory and now a car company posing as a robotics venture. Moreover, his recent pro-Putin intervention probably means Starlink has no transformative future outside America and a small countries.

Plenty of counter-examples, including the entire dot-com era.

Growth at that scale is hard. I don't care if you don't like the company - it still hard.

Because that's worse than losing money, that's incompetently giving it away.

They are costs.

Derivative liabilities, SAFEs - those are basically taking cash from RETAIL shareholders and giving them to employees and early investors INSTEAD of using it to fund the business.

Let's have that discussion if you want, but don't act like a thing that is CLEARLY a COST to the business isn't a cost.

- AI is a useful tool and we're still seeing steady improvements in performance and efficiency

- There is a bubble in the stock market, fed by unrealistic expectations of what AI can achieve in the timeframes the investments need to provide returns in (e.g "AI is pretty useful and delivers productivity improvements in coding, law and other desk jobs" vs "in 12 months everyone will be out of a job and/or humanity will be exterminated, AGI is almost here, winner takes all")

So yeah, the schizophrenic Yudkowsky tier hype bullshit should hopefully disappear soon and then we can move on to something else.

Nobody is in control but Taiwan Semiconductor. Not Samsung, not Micron, not Nvidia.

Orders that can't be fulfilled get canceled. Canceled orders mean canceled plans and canceled companies follow.

Someone bigger will buy the husk and monetize it somehow - probably for gambling.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512...

Sun made bank 25 years ago because their servers was needed for websites, today we run larger workloads on 5$ VPS servers (well maybe the VPS servers has gotten more expensive due to HW shortages but they're not intrinsically expensive anymore).

This may also be why OpenAI punted on their IPO: Anthropic has had the lead for most of 2026, so their consumption-based revenue is probably not looking pretty.

If you’re not generating enough revenue to cover ALL expenditures - you are in effect subsidising as you should raise prices.

Why haven’t they? It would harm their business.

Maybe not great, but a good problem to have if it means your stock is skyrocketing.

Explain what you think this means.

I'm not sure I'd call it a great result, but it's a promising one. If they can increase demand without significant changes in margin or R&D spending, they are on the path to becoming very profitable

A better analogy would be a firearm company offering a service where one of their employees takes one of their guns and fires it off at whatever you ask them to. One can imagine that the liability implications of this service would be rather different from the perspective of the company.

Second, this happens all the time that people blame tool makers despite in this case specific legislation to stop lawfare on firearm mfgs. The PLCA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_of_Lawful_Commerce_... exists specifically because of gun control groups trying to attack mfgs to achieve their political goals. Does AI need the same law? Is the same lawfare happening?

The answer to this question represents the difference between throwing a hammer at someone - the hammer is essentially just an extension of your body - and paying a hitman to brutalize someone. In the first case, you're only on the hook for assault or battery; in the latter case, you're potentially on the hook for conspiracy, solicitation, etc.

And then there is of course the question as to whether Claude is the agent of the user prompting it or of Anthropic itself. But, as you say, this is a wide-open legal question.

All of the other providers in that list have their own APIs and plans too

OpenRouter is not a useful signal.

Intentional Gemini token consumption is likely very very small.

That’s why they hire ‘for the misson’. They have to pull off something magical to make all this work financially or they go bust.

Of course it is. Apple is taking that strategic approach. If Anthropic believes it’s approaching saturation, pulling the plug when it’s at steady state and its rivals are over-invested is the winning move.

The total amount spent on salaries in he US alone is over 12T dollars.

Assuming AI becomes ever more useful and is widely adopted 500B in revenue is not that crazy.

But.

They may peak at 500B before this bubble bursts, simply because other major industry players are betting on AI as a means to get folks to believe in their own stock.

It’s belief all the way down, until you get to the point where “the market” starts asking where the return on investment is, and why they haven’t seen it yet. By that time, the investors have gotten their return and cashed out, and it’s the pension funds and the retail traders that are holding the bag.

And of course, at some point AI’s promise will be delivered in a form or fashion as yet unknown to us, but that is still years away, and until folks recognize that LLMs as they exist to day are not the path to that, they’ll continue to believe in this valuation.

There are two questions. Will the value keep scaling? And how much of that value chain will anthropic hold on to? Right now software development is being eaten alive by LLMs. Will that happen to other industries too? And in the long run, what do the models we run look like? Are people going to end up self hosing opensource models themselves, or are we going to collectively hitch our wagons to frontier models provided by anthropic and their competitors?

If ai keeps getting better - which I think it will - and if anthropic can corner a large part of the market in an enduring way - which seems less likely to me - then yes. I can easily imagine them becoming a huge company.

What you are saying is the same thing that has been said about anyone trying to do anything massive and at scale. Can't be done - thats ridiculous - you are out of your mind.

* Amazon is a logistics company * Walmart is a logistics and retail company * Apple is a hardware company (that uses software to set their hardware apart) * NVidia is a hardware company

The closest you get is Microsoft, at 281B in revenue. Some might argue Google/Alphabet, which is in the same area, but they sell Ads, not software.

Anthropic's expectations is that they will be able to fast-track their revenue generation to almost twice what Microsoft does today. In less than a few years.

It's not a great position to be in and it will still take a long time for the compute gap to close. In the meantime, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are essentially unchallenged.

[1] https://www.konstantinpilz.com/posts-publications/chinese-st...

What's the endgame once the dust settles? Is it going to be a utility like water or electricity and the cheapest offer will prevail, in which case margins will be crushed? Or is Anthropic (or some other big AI lab) going to swallow everything and become the Google Search of LLMs, with everybody else fighting for scraps?

Or is it local compute, models becoming more efficient and hardware becoming cheaper (again) and companies hosting their own AI clusters like they would run SAP?

I think there is a plausible path where this valuation actually works out, but it's a narrow one IMO. I also want to acknowledge that I personally would prefer if it wasn't the case and a more distributed, open model prevailed.

Point is taken - competition is fierce and will be biting everyone's ankles.

I wish they were, but I always wonder when people chime in with Chinese models what they are actually doing with those. I have an OpenRouter account and give various models a shot every other month, wishing for an alternative, but I always come back to Claude. Even more so since the switch from Opus 5.1 to 5.5. To me, personally, it's unmatched. Like a year ago it was very different, and I would use other models all the time. But honestly at the time they all felt kind of "meh" still. I just hope everyone is at a good baseline in a year from now on, so I actually have a choice. And then, as you stated, things will get interesting.

tl;dr: I agree

I dont know when, but i think if you keep menacing of taking technology of people hands for any political reason will be a reason for people to not use it or to rely in a more reasonable party.

Why would I pick anthropic.

The reception of saying things like this is interesting. AI stans think I'm way too pessimistic but AI haters think I'm mindlessly optimistic.

On that front, I think DeepSeek is a dark horse. They are really odd - not chasing revenue, care more about unit profitability, are obsessed with driving down costs (like Elon back in the day). As the founder says, they are content with where they are, being the model that does 80% for a fraction of the cost.

I mention them because they are playing a different game and might be able to out-innovate everyone else.

And claude code as a harness and skill/plugin/mcp ecosystem is far more valuable than any one model.

And coward for long-running tasks, though they're slipping on that one because they're really trying hard not to make Claude an assistant. We'll see if they react to Muse and change course.

But the Chinese free-weight models? Not a competitor. If/when those companies (or others) build vertically integrated productivity stacks on those free models, then we'll talk. Microsoft certainly saw that opportunity but couldn't get out of their own way and are basically roadkill at this point.

This is a "utility" mindset. If you bet that Anthropic is just like a monthly electric bill, then it's within the realm of possibility.

For the record - I don't think that's gonna happen.

But lets be clear: the growth of Anthropics revenue is very fast and way too many people stll don't even use AI

Anthropic needs to earn 52B a year in annual revenue to honor those specific commitments plus obviously its own operating expenses... and yeah that will require Anthropic to grow as a company, but their S-1 indicates 67.2B a year in revenue and sure maybe they stop growing and this is their peak... or maybe they do manage to grow further to 80B a year, 90B a year...

The market for Claude Code is much bigger than professional software devs. It's really anyone who uses a computer. I already know normal people who have been using it for personal software.

I tried to look for the valuation in the linked document, did you see it or any reference to a valuation elsewhere in anything published by Anthropic? what is "their valuation" that you refer to?

Source: https://x.com/a16z/status/2113986385908842870

"Zooming out, GPUs are still renting ahead of a standard 6-year depreciation schedule

Rental price vs. schedule: - H200: +143% - B200: +111% - RTX PRO 6000: +73% - H100: +54% - A100: +9%

Most of the gap opened up after April, when token demand took off"

Then if inference does grow to a $2-3 trillion/year market that Anthropic is a big winner, as big as NVDA is now (they're going to be over $500 billion in revenue in calendar year 2027).

Employees are a different matter, lockouts are for them not quitting immediately. My bet is that a few of high profile departures recently is exactly for this reason: no lockout if you aren't employed anymore.

I don't think the ultra-wealthy care about genetic diversity.

You can simply not buy shares in companies you think are on a doomed trajectory.

That said, depending on the IPO target price, I might short it.

Similarly nobody is saying AI can’t be a successful business, but here too the big labs have dug themselves into a giant hole such that a bankruptcy reset may ultimately be the only way out of it. Time will tell.