Anthropic achieved a breakout moment this week, as investors bet that the start-up has captured the market selling AI products to businesses, which has generated hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue.
AI Labs has kept a lower profile than rivals OpenAI, Google and Meta, which have focused on consumer-facing products rather than offering their models as tools for developers and companies.
This strategy came into focus in recent days with the release of new software that spooked the public markets. Anthropic also attracted attention with a Super Bowl ad that took aim at rivals, drawing a sharp reaction from OpenAI chief Sam Altman.
The five-year-old San Francisco conglomerate has been thrust into the spotlight as it finalizes a nearly $35 billion funding round at a $350 billion valuation and moves toward a blockbuster initial public offering this year.
Anthropic’s annual revenue is expected to grow from $1 billion at the beginning of last year to more than $9 billion by the end of 2025. The company has guided investors that annual revenue will exceed $30 billion by the end of this year and will continue to accelerate from there, according to people familiar with its finances.
Anthropic’s attractiveness to businesses, product focus and stable leadership means it is seen as a safer long-term bet than OpenAI, according to 12 investors who spoke to the FT.
“Anthropic is a well-run company with a simple capital structure that is working right now,” said Mike Paulus, a billionaire former partner at Andreessen Horowitz, whose family office backs start-ups. “The sentiment has moved toward the idea that the enterprise is really where you get paid for AI.”
The San Francisco-headquartered start-up was founded in 2021 by a group of ex-OpenAI researchers, including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, chief executive and president, respectively.
Since then, it has cultivated a cool, security-oriented image, reinforced by lengthy blog posts by its CEO warning about the dangers of uncontrolled AI.
Anthropic’s cloud code tool for software engineering has become an industry leader since its launch a year ago. The system can read a company’s existing code, plan tasks, and execute them. It marks an early demonstration of “agent” capabilities that investors expect will open up massive new markets as AI models gain the ability to complete complex tasks independently.
It enthralled workers and gave rise to the term “cloud benders” for marathon sessions building websites or apps with the tool.
“Anthropic wanted to build with cloud code internally, (but) when they saw how good it was they aggressively produced it,” said Matt Murphy, partner at Menlo Ventures, which first invested in Anthropic in 2023.
Anthropic is facing stiff competition from Google and OpenAI, with OpenAI this week releasing an update to its own coding tool, Codex.
An investor in both Anthropic and OpenAI stressed that both can still thrive. “The magic of Anthropic around coding is completely different than the magic of OpenAI around ChatGPIT instead of search.”
Another OpenAI supporter highlighted Anthropic’s modest market share: “Coding doesn’t equal enterprise, it equals developers.”
But the bet by investors in Anthropic’s ongoing funding round — which includes Nvidia, Microsoft and top-tier venture capital firms including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital and Altimeter Capital — is that the company’s tools will take off while reinvigorating white-collar jobs.
“We took the idea that AI is not ‘enterprise’ software in the traditional sense that goes after the IT budget: it captures the labor expense, at some point you’re taking over the human workflow from start to finish,” said Sebastian Duesterhoft, partner at Lightspeed.
The firm wrote a $1 billion check to Anthropic last year, its largest investment.
To emphasize its advantage, Anthropic on Thursday released a powerful new model called Cloud Opus 4.6, and has pioneered techniques to train its models and manage their interactions with applications and databases.
In recent times, it released a set of “plug in” tools that cater to specific industries, including law, sales, finance, marketing, and customer support. On Friday, Goldman Sachs announced it was working with Anthropic on an AI agent to automate roles at the bank.
The moves helped trigger a selloff in public markets this week that wiped billions of dollars from stocks related to data, enterprise software, advertising and publishing.
“Anthropic’s story has been very consistent: Increasing intelligence will unlock more market share. It sounds very vague until you look at what they really mean,” said Lillian Lee, an investment manager at Baillie Gifford, which first backed Anthropic in 2025.
The market reaction this week represents “a moment of realization,” he said.
Lee and other investors cited the start-up’s mission-oriented culture as crucial to its success in attracting and retaining talent. One said, “Culture is an afterthought in most places.” “But to them it’s a religion, they’re out there evangelical about their beliefs.”
All seven Anthropic co-founders will remain with the company. According to many investors, this stability provides an advantage over OpenAI, which has seen eight of its 11-strong founding team depart since its launch in 2015. Altman was ousted by the company’s board sometime in 2023.
The company this week pledged not to introduce ads into its products, distancing itself from rivals like OpenAI, which has started testing ads in ChatGPTT for new revenue.
Anthropic plans to broadcast this decision through a series of cheeky television commercials to air during this weekend’s Super Bowl. The commercials are supported by a Dr. Dre track with the lyrics: “What’s the difference between me and you? You talk good but you don’t do what you’re supposed to do”.
Daniela Amodei has claimed that they are not directed to any other company.
Before telling the tech podcast, Altman described the ads on X as “blatantly dishonest” and “on brand for anthropic doublespeak.” TBPN The war of words was “a sham”.
Altman said: “People are excited for a food fight between companies, but the amazing capabilities of these models, the product, the basis of excitement around Codex, it seems much more important.”
through data visualization Clara Murray
