Anthropic Sees over $30T in Potential Revenue

(wsj.com)

31 points | by cwwc 3 hours ago ago

68 comments

  • curuinor 3 hours ago

    Look. 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.

    • UltraSane 3 hours ago

      It would be hilarious if the price of cocaine actually affected macroeconomics because of how it affects human behavior.

      • fhdkweig 2 hours ago

        It 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.

    • interestpiqued 3 hours ago

      Honestly you have a point. The decrease in cost of cocaine is very real

  • speedgoose 3 hours ago

    I see myself over $3000T in potential revenues too. You shall see. Please invest.

  • tfrancisl 3 hours 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.

    • karmakurtisaani 3 hours ago

      1 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 an hour ago

      Can be achieved with low/no margin financialization of revenue between a web of companies.

    • intrasight 3 hours ago

      Echoes of Enron

    • ForHackernews 3 hours ago

      "Our Neumann projections show us on track to achieve 15.3 heptillion dollars in annual revenue by the year 2030."

      • goatlover 3 hours ago

        Data centering the universe is an improvement on paper clips I guess.

  • ViktorRay 3 hours ago

    When 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.

  • 0cf8612b2e1e 3 hours ago

    2025 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
  • horse-shot 3 hours ago

    Is it realistic to expect every person on earth to pay them $3,500?

    • sandeepkd 3 hours ago

      Of 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).

    • ryandvm an hour ago

      I'm sure they can extract $3,500 worth of value from everyone's existence.

    • tkahnoski 3 hours ago

      Agree 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.

    • Brendinooo 3 hours ago

      Stretch the timeline out enough and add enough inflation and anything is possible!

    • 3 hours ago
      [deleted]
    • goatlover 3 hours ago

      Put 100% tariffs on everything and drive inflation and trade wars up.

    • greenavocado 3 hours ago

      Their friends control the Central Banks and the printing will continue until $30T buys you a loaf of bread

      • christophilus 3 hours ago

        Yeah. 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.

    • jstummbillig 3 hours ago

      a) 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.

      • jazzpush2 3 hours ago

        I 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 3 hours ago

          All my friends know that Sam Altman uses astroturf as carpeting in his office.

      • mawadev 3 hours ago

        In fact, we should put an AI Tax on everything you buy, because AI was used somewhere to make it

    • onion2k 3 hours ago

      The 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.

  • 01284a7e 3 hours ago

    Before 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.

  • the__alchemist 3 hours ago

    There 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 3 hours ago

      Sure there is. You've been able to search/sort/filter/group for a while now.

  • cdrnsf an hour ago

    Ah, so it's not just their products that hallucinate.

  • pluc 3 hours ago

    The only obstacle is everyone using it for everything

  • TSiege 3 hours ago

    The 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

  • seydor 3 hours ago

    That is a typo. It is a Q not a T ! How could we have missed it

    • bitwize 3 hours ago

      I'm sure Sam and Dario have a bottle of Cinco Comas sitting on that high shelf...

  • the__alchemist 3 hours ago

    Puts once they IPO

  • AJRF 3 hours ago

    What are they currently making?

  • vesrah 3 hours ago

    Over what period of time?

    • HarHarVeryFunny 3 hours ago

      It's a Feynman path integral - integrated over all possible future trajectories of Anthropic, including those where they have a thriving business on Tatooine.

    • spwa4 3 hours ago

      I feel like I'm a comedian saying this, but of course per year.

  • 3 hours ago
    [deleted]
  • misiti3780 3 hours ago

    They 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 3 hours ago

      They’re focused on curing all cancers in 5 years. Curing claude code is beneath them.

  • paulpauper 3 hours ago

    I remember how 3 years ago the consensus, even here, was it was a fad or unsustainable.

    • lovich 3 hours ago

      As 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.

      • fuzzfactor an hour ago

        With 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?

      • mysterydip 3 hours ago

        Sure, the revenue per unit looks bad, but we’ll make it up in volume!

    • goatlover 3 hours ago

      You think $30 trillion projected growth is sustainable?

    • bigstrat2003 3 hours ago

      It still is unsustainable.

  • ForHackernews 3 hours ago

    Yep, 92% of estimated US GDP in 2026. That sounds totally plausible to me.

    • garciasn 3 hours ago

      Or ~25% of the world's GDP.

    • SiempreViernes 3 hours ago

      It's just 25 % of world GDP bro, and only slightly more than double the projected worldwide construction market in 2028.

  • glimshe 3 hours ago

    That's awesome! I also predict that Leopold Aschenbrenner will be the world's first trillionaire under 30!

    PS: Not.

  • throwaway23597 3 hours ago

    Honestly though, if they legitimately achieve RSI, I feel like all bets are off and anything could happen.

  • josefritzishere 2 hours ago

    This is delusional. Are you ready for the biggest short ever?

  • mmooss 3 hours ago

    As 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.

  • rvz 3 hours ago

    Now AI companies are playing with ridiculous Enron-level accounting tricks to justify their already inflated valuations?

    • hermitcrab 3 hours ago

      How else are they going to get rich selling something for a tenth of what it costs them?

      • intrasight 3 hours ago

        Enron did it for years and the senior managers became fabulously wealthy.

  • ofjcihen 3 hours ago

    It’s heartening to see that most of HN is starting to call shenanigans on these ridiculous numbers.

  • theideaofcoffee 3 hours ago

    So 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.

  • 0x70run 3 hours ago

    [dead]