How is Anthropic, OpenAI and xAi going to compete against the likes of Google that can spend $200 billion a year? It’s an impossible war and all these investors are throwing their money into a bottomless insatiable pit of money.

Until the funding stops for one reason or another and then everyone loses all their money at once like a star that collapses into a black hole singularity in a femtosecond.

• twobitshifter

  today at 10:03 PM

  As someone who thought Google+ doomed facebook, because of Gmail accounts and everyone with Google as their homepage already, I learned not to overestimate Google’s abilities.

• mrtksn

  today at 8:43 PM

  Theoretically Apple can spend just as much. What are the outcomes though? All those giants have their own business that are established and profitable.

  It’s the new kids in the block that will make the difference.

  You know those lists on twitter about how many companies US has in top 10 and are presented as a win? Those are actually lists of capital concentrations blocking innovation. It looks like US is winning but for some reason life is better in EU and innovation is faster in China.

  It’s companies like OpenAI Anthropic that will move US ahead. Even if some core innovation or and capital comes from the establishment.

  • c7b

    today at 10:02 PM

    > Theoretically Apple can spend just as much. What are the outcomes though?

    The GP was talking about Google specifically, and their outcomes on AI are nothing to scoff at. They had a rocky late start, but they seem to have gotten over that. Their models are now very much competitive with the startups. And it's not just that have more money to spend. They probably have more training data than anyone in the world, and they also have more infrastructure, more manpower, more of a global footprint than the startups.

    The Innovator's Dilemma is an anecdotal, maybe a statistical relationship at best, but not a fundamental law of nature. When an established company has everything it should take to become a leader in a new industry in theory, and in practice their products are already on par with the industry leaders, you know at some point it becomes rational to think that maybe they might become a leader.

  • sousousou

    today at 9:29 PM

    Sometimes I worry about the incentives for innovation in the US.

    Step 1, find something to innovate on, sell the promise of it to investors. Step 2, build a prototype or worst case, build it for real and start generating income from your truly innovate and unique product. Step 3, get acquired by a large company and then shut down because your product competed with theirs.

    End result, general public possibly benefited from your innovation, but in the long run, it was temporary.

    Maybe the incentives would be better if it were harder for large companies to acquire small ones? If the path to riches where driven primarily by delivering value to customers. Would love to hear other's opinions on this.

    • WarmWash

      today at 9:32 PM

      Well in China its

      "Get bankrolled by the state at the state's discretion until they get what they want, even if they need to burn $1B to get $1M of value"

      and in Europe it's

      "Just buy it from the US or China".

      • kgabis

        today at 9:58 PM

        I wonder what makes EU so wealthy to just buy stuff everywhere - maybe it's the export of high-end technologies inaccessible to US and China?

        • WarmWash

          today at 10:34 PM

          The EU is no way share or form in a good economic position right now. That's why euro leaders have been kowtowing to Trump despite him being a deranged lunatic.

          Delete all American software, American defense, American energy, and Chinese hardware from the EU tomorrow. That's the deep-seated unease that keeps EU leaders up at night. Europe needs to be doing 3-4% GDP growth annually and have a globally competitive top to bottom tech an defense industry, and it needs that years ago.

          The problem is that the EU needs to become more like the US to do this, and for people who grew up under the protective overhang of the soviet collapse, this is mostly unthinkable. Just like the US not bankrolling half of Ukraine's defense would be unthinkable...

      • lossolo

        today at 9:47 PM

        > "Get bankrolled by the state at the state's discretion until they get what they want, even if they need to burn $1B to get $1M of value"

        If that's how it worked, they wouldn't lead in anything, they'd be bankrupt already. They burn state money like VCs burn cash. DeepSeek, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Huawei, etc., disprove your point.

        • WarmWash

          today at 10:05 PM

          Look into how their 5 year plans have lead to capital investment with almost zero feedback. A heavily bureaucratic system of bureaucrats incentivized to spend massively to boost their own appearance, and cover up losses/inefficiencies.

          Ghost cities, empty high speed rail lines, solar cells being mass produced at a loss.

          All these things also produced end products the state wanted, no doubt. But the capital allocation strategy is basically a "throw all the money the leader gives in that direction until the leader says stop".

  • SoftTalker

    today at 9:04 PM

    > What are the outcomes though?

    NVIDIA, and contractors who build data centers, and manufacturers who supply them, will all get rich.

  • pazimzadeh

    today at 10:12 PM

    The new kids have an easier time focusing. the big kids can integrate AI with their existing products and user data

    In the long term, big kids win no? The big kids are also going to have an easier time with hardware at scale too

  • SamvitJ

    today at 10:01 PM

    "but for some reason life is better in EU" citation needed

  • logicchains

    today at 9:22 PM

    >It looks like US is winning but for some reason life is better in EU and innovation is faster in China

    As measured by prosperity life in the US is better; the poorest US state has a higher GDP per capita than most western European countries. Americans have bigger houses, more food, bigger cars, bigger salaries, and access to better medical care and schools if they've got an okay job. Most Europeans are lucky to make $40k/year post-tax. And America is still winning on innovation because its AI models are ahead of China's both in benchmarks and in user preferences. How many people do you know professionally who use a Chinese model and agent framework instead of e.g. Claude Code or OpenAI Codex?

    • BowBun

      today at 9:32 PM

      It's telling that the measure of quality of life you use in this comment is entirely materialistic in nature. I also challenge the idea that US provides 'access to better medical care', as it is pretty well documented that Americans spend more for lower quality care compared to similar developed countries.

      I believe this cultural divide is a big reason America won't make it back to the top - insatiable desire for wealth and a lack of values-based principals. Ironically US companies are the first to tout their 'values' in the workplace.

      • brettgriffin

        today at 9:58 PM

        > I believe this cultural divide is a big reason America won't make it back to the top

        What top are you referring to?

        We're in a thread about a US company announcing its new $30B fundraise from a group of elite US growth investment funds arguing about whether this company will be able to overthrow the $4T US tech behemoth and suggesting that all the other US tech behemoths are actually stifling progress.

      • WarmWash

        today at 9:51 PM

        If you are in the bottom 30% of earners, the EU is better.

        If you are in the top 30% of earners, the US is better.

        • TheOtherHobbes

          today at 10:19 PM

          And the top 1% get to have fun on a private island.

    • hiq

      today at 9:29 PM

      > bigger cars

      I gotta say, I found this one especially funny as I currently don't have a car and that's actually my biggest luxury: being able to go around without one and no spending time in commute.

    • shakow

      today at 10:15 PM

      > more food

      Yeah, so I don't want to be a Debbie Downer, but as a European who visited the US, your food is definitely not something I would use as an example of your QoL.

    • ivantop

      today at 9:26 PM

      To your last point, the answer is probably much different in China

    • realo

      today at 9:52 PM

      I have a friend who needs a medication that costs more than 30,000$ a year. Here in Canada it is 100% covered by our government health insurance regime. In the USA he would be bankrupt (or dead).

      Here in Canada if I have an accident i do not have to worry about being bankrupt if the ambulance brings me to the wrong hospital.

      I am really not enthusiastic about the so-called superior quality of life some US-ians like to boast about.

      • Petersipoi

        today at 10:00 PM

        > In the USA he would be bankrupt (or dead)

        Why? I live in the US. I have the best healthcare coverage in the world. I pay absolutely nothing for it, ever. No matter the cost. And I have access tot he best doctors, innovations, and technology in the world.

        Tell me again why your friend would be dead? It sounds like you really have a poor understanding of American health care.

        • realo

          today at 10:02 PM

          I suppose you work... and have an employer who pays for your extraordinary insurance?

    • stackghost

      today at 9:30 PM

      >As measured by prosperity life in the US is better; the poorest US state has a higher GDP per capita than most western European countries.

      GDP per capita/prosperity is a poor proxy for quality of life. The US is lagging most of the developed world in most quality of life metrics, even as reported by US news outlets, which don't rank the US in even the top 20: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/rankings/quality-...

      >Americans have bigger houses, more food, bigger cars,

      The size of one's house or car is at best weakly-correlated with quality of life. I would rather not own a car at all and be able to walk everywhere, rather than spend hours of my life commuting in a gigantic SUV.

      >bigger salaries, and access to better medical care and schools if they've got an okay job.

      The US ranks the lowest in the developed world for life expectancy, and among the highest in obesity globally (obesity being a major determinant of health). The US remains the only developed country where an unlucky dice roll (e.g. genetic-linked cancer) will bankrupt you and destroy the livelihoods of your children.

      This is not the flex you think it is.

      • jfim

        today at 9:48 PM

        Keep in mind there are two Americas, a wealthy one and a not wealthy one; someone posting on HN is likely in the former bucket, and not juggling a retail job and doing Uber on the side while being unable to afford healthcare.

        • foobarian

          today at 10:03 PM

          I'm not sure even wealthy America is better off. They might have their $3M mansion in a nice town but it will still have no sidewalks, be 2 miles from school, and an hour from major city center.

          • SpicyLemonZest

            today at 10:26 PM

            I don't know where you've gotten the idea that wealthy Americans spending $3M on their homes can't have sidewalks or live near major city centers. It's a big country, so there's lots of places that don't have sidewalks or aren't near a city. But any wealthy American who wants those things can easily get them without making compromises.

            (The school thing I'll grant you, although in a car-centric country a school 2 miles away often takes like 5 minutes to get to.)

• impulser_

  today at 9:48 PM

  Because it's Google they can't build products and they only care about benchmarking.

  The product they released so far are all half assed experiments.

  Gemini 3 Pro is now being beaten by open source models because they can't fix or don't want to fix the problems with the Gemini models being completely useless.

  The same for Microsoft.

  Microsoft had GitHub Copilot, and Microsoft Copilot and both of them are useless to Claude Code and Claude Cowork.

  You can have all the money in the world, but nothing is stopping you from building useless garbage.

  • rvnx

    today at 9:56 PM

    Claude is clearly the most superior product right now.

    Gemini is absurdly expensive for low quality (3000 USD of tokens are not even worth what you get @ Anthropic for 200 USD).

    • lostmsu

      today at 10:12 PM

      The same can be said about Claude (no or tiny Opus on Pro) vs GPT-5.2 high (5.3-codex if you like terminal bench hacking).

      • rvnx

        today at 10:25 PM

        You mean GPT-5.3-Codex is a much better value than Claude Opus for programming ? If yes then I'm very interested as I am using Claude there

• buccal

  today at 8:29 PM

  I'm trying paid tier Gemini and it doesn't allow to keep have personal chat history when you disable training on your data, on reload of the page your chat is gone. Even free tier of ChatGPT allows disabling training on your data while allowing to keep such basic functionality.

  Some technical advancements are not worth it if you do not respect your users.

  • MagicMoonlight

    today at 8:51 PM

    Yeah I’m never using a Google product. The sole purpose of their company is to be evil. At least other companies are indifferent.

    • Yizahi

      today at 9:07 PM

      Google is evil in passive way, like sprawling bureaucracy making you life slowly worse and worse but also doing some stuff to at least some fraction of population. OpenAI and Sam are determined and energetic evil, laser focused on making whole human population jobless and homeless in shortest way possible and not producing anything else of value, no other products. I'd rather prefer the former evil out of the two.

  • nickysielicki

    today at 8:47 PM

    How does their top tier subscription compare in usage limits to the $200/mo Claude usage limits?

  • jiggawatts

    today at 9:03 PM

    Another basic feature that’s missing is sharing a Gemini chat as a link anyone can view.

    OpenAI figured this out: it’s awesome marketing when people send each other links to the app with a convenient text box to continue the conversation. It’s viral.

    Google meanwhile set this up so that “anyone with the link can view” is actually “anyone with the link and a Google account”.

    That’s grade A failure of marketing.

    The PM in charge of that decision ought to be walked off a plank.

    • jeffbee

      today at 9:28 PM

      This doesn't sound right. I just opened a shared link in a fresh incognito window and it works fine.

      • jiggawatts

        today at 9:31 PM

        Try sharing from the Google AI Studio Playground.

        E.g.: https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%...

• timmmmmmay

  today at 8:15 PM

  Google fucks up 90% of their products, why do you think Gemini is in the 10%?

  • H8crilA

    today at 8:35 PM

    Google has barely released a successful product in 20 years.

    • Yizahi

      today at 9:00 PM

      Depend on the definition of the "product". For example some banal cloud storage in which everyone competes. And it's an "old" product, despite being invisibly improved behind the scenes, just like at any other provider. Google has pretty competitive storage AND they are fully abusing Android integration for AND they have pretty good bundling of that storage with other products, including, you've guessed it - LLM Gemini. So say a person is not a professional user of LLMs like a developer burning tokens in a dozen accounts simultaneously. A person has a phone and eventually memory runs out, so he buys a one click Google storage for 4 bucks. And suddenly he has Gemini Pro included too. So why pay 20 bucks to Anthropic, when Google costs 1/5 of that AND has other stuff bundled too?

      So maybe Google is lagging on truly new products (btw, does Gemini itself with its TPUs count as a new product? I'd say yes), but "old" products are entrenched enough to carry them and compete.

      • browningstreet

        today at 10:39 PM

        Google Drive is easily the worst of the desktop cloud storage options. It’s okay for Google Docs but not other files if that’s what you’re talking about..

    • rvnx

      today at 10:00 PM

      Google Cloud is good and successful. Except they can't implement billing hard caps, or pretend they can't.

    • asdfman123

      today at 9:48 PM

      Google is good at buying existing products and scaling them, which is exactly what they did with DeepMind.

    • Hamuko

      today at 8:39 PM

      I thought that the likes of Android, Google Docs, Google Translate, etc. were fairly successful. Chrome and ChromeOS also seem fairly popular too.

      • gregable

        today at 8:45 PM

        A lot of those are getting pretty close to 20 years ago.

      • atlimar

        today at 9:01 PM

        This year:

        chromeos is 17

        android is 18

        chrome is 18

        google docs is 20

        google translate is 20

        • stock_toaster

          today at 9:56 PM

          In retrospect, it is wild how good/successful google was 17-20 years ago!

          • rvnx

            today at 10:02 PM

            Few years ago, we had Google Bard, the ancestor of Gemini, which was supposed to be an AI LLM, and when you right-clicked the page, it was a fake page with hardcoded sentences in a .js file...

  • davnicwil

    today at 9:09 PM

    well, it's basically existential, so the incentive is there to not only get it very right but also to limit the delta with how right anyone else gets it. The same can't really be said of the long tail of products Google have done.

    Look to GCP as an example. It had to be done, with similar competitive dynamics, it was done very well.

    Look to Android as another.

    • sekai

      today at 9:38 PM

      > well, it's basically existential, so the incentive is there to not only get it very right but also to limit the delta with how right anyone else gets it. The same can't really be said of the long tail of products Google have done.

      I've yet to see anything that threatens Google's ad monopoly.

      • davnicwil

        today at 9:49 PM

        I mean I guess this is classic disruption theory.

        It's not that a dominant position goes away overnight. In fact that would be precisely the impetus to spur the incumbent to pivot immediately and have a much better chance of winning in the new paradigm.

        It's that it, with some probability, gets eaten away slowly and the incumbent therefore cannot let go of the old paradigm, eventually losing their dominance over some period of years.

        So nobody really knows how LLMs will change the search paradigm and the ads business models downstream of that, we're seeing that worked out in real time right now, but it's definitely high enough probability that Google see it and (crucially) have the shareholder mandate to act on it.

        That's the existential threat and they're navigating it pretty well so far. The strategy seems balanced, measured, and correct. As the situation evolves I think they have every chance of actually not being disrupted should it come to that.

  • xmprt

    today at 8:18 PM

    Because Google has the money to build 10 different versions/iterations of Gemini and can essentially force one to work. They have most people's data and most people use them for mail/search/browser/maps as well.

    In my opinion though this is a race to the bottom rather than a winner takes all situation so I don't think anyone is coming out ahead once the dust settles.

    • stouset

      today at 8:36 PM

      Google built ten different chat products, how did that go?

      • XorNot

        today at 9:44 PM

        Does it matter? Microsoft won by default with Teams because it actually turns out no one cares about chat or even has a choice in it: employees use whatever the company picks.

    • kingkawn

      today at 8:24 PM

      This was the same argument made for Google Wave and Google+ and both completely tanked

      • thewebguyd

        today at 8:30 PM

        The tech behind wave eventually made its way into Google docs though and pioneered collaborative document editing, so wasn't a complete failure even though the product itself was killed.

        No comment on Google+, Google has a storied history of failure on any kind of social media/chat type products.

        Where Google wins is just simply having enough money to outlive anyone else. As the saying goes "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" In this case, Google is the market and they can just keep throwing money at the wall until OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. go under.

        • vidarh

          today at 9:05 PM

          Google Docs has no features remotely like what Google Wave was.

          And there was collaborative editing long before Google Wave.

      • hackingonempty

        today at 8:31 PM

        Social media has strong network effects that keeps competitors at bay. What network effects are OpenAI/Anthropic/etc accumulating?

      • heavyset_go

        today at 8:36 PM

        Yes, but Gemini is actually good and so are their APIs.

  • infecto

    today at 8:25 PM

    Agree. Look at how miserably MSFT has failed at integrating AI tastefully in their business.

    Google makes money selling ads. Nothing else matters.

    • measurablefunc

      today at 9:20 PM

      They target those ads by ingesting as many signals as possible from as many input devices & sensors as they can possibly convince people to use. They make a lot of money from advertising b/c they have managed to convince the most number of people to give them as many behavioral signals as possible & they will continue to do so. They kill products only when the signal is not valuable enough to improve their advertising business but that's clearly not the case w/ AI.

  • root_axis

    today at 8:30 PM

    Because the product quality doesn't matter if the competition isn't making any money.

  • dlahoda

    today at 8:53 PM

    google the only ai which invests mixing llm ai with real ai, and it seems work well.

  • dlahoda

    today at 8:52 PM

    race to the bottom. google in house cheaper inference hardware. anthropic buys it.

  • XorNot

    today at 9:41 PM

    Persistence. Google has a lot more endurance then OpenAI does in this game.

    The current AI market is going to destroy anyone who's specialized into it compared to having alternative revenue streams to subsidize it.

    • moonlighter

      today at 10:07 PM

      Does Alphabet/Google have any other significant alternative revenue streams though besides their ad revenue? And won't that decrease significantly the more people use AI tools for research than firing up a google web search? I find myself using Claude more and more doing web research and comparing products/reviews...without getting a single ad served up from Google.

  • longfacehorrace

    today at 9:06 PM

    The conclusion Google is engaged in consumer capitalism is wild.

    They're engaged in computing research and merely engage in consumer capitalism as a consequence of political and social constraints.

    Products are a means to an end not the goal.

    OpenAI and Anthropic are product companies and are more likely to fail like most product companies do as they will lack broad and wide depth.

    Google has experience in design, implementation, and 24/7 ops with every type of SaaS there is. They can bin LLMs tomorrow and still make bank. Same cannot be said for OAI or Anthropic.

  • afavour

    today at 8:36 PM

    Do they though?

    Google does things I hate with their products. But the money printing machine keeps going whrrr faster and faster.

• alwillis

  today at 10:25 PM

  > It’s an impossible war and all these investors are throwing their money into a bottomless insatiable pit of money.

  Anthropic went from zero to $14 billion in revenue in less than 3 years, growing at 10x per year.

  That's what they're investing in.

  Also Anthropic seems laser-focused, unlike some of their competitors who are throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks.

  • Insanity

    today at 10:26 PM

    Revenue, but what about profit? Google can be cash positive but I’m not sure Anthropic can be the same.

• Traster

  today at 8:25 PM

  Well there's a good reason that OpenAI partnered up with Microsoft. The calculation is that the established big techs - Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta are all going to be significantly impacted by AI so it's not unreasonable to look at Anthropic at 10% of their market cap as a reasonable value. Would it be worth Apple to bring Anthropic in house? They failed to deliver AI themselves, they know the risks of being dependent on Google. If AI goes far enough it may totally remove Apple's differentiation.

  Some of the Big Techs are building their own in house stuff (Meta, Google), but it wouldn't be crazy to see acquisitions by the others, especially if the market cools slightly. And then there's the possibility that these companies mature their revenue streams enough to start actually really throwing off money and paying off the investment.

  • xp84

    today at 9:09 PM

    > they know the risks of being dependent on Google

    I wouldn't argue it's that risky. Look at their past entanglements:

    1. Google Default Search Bribe - brings in $20B a year for literally doing nothing

    2. Google Maps: Google let them build their own custom app using Google's backend, and it worked fine all the way up until Apple chose to exit that arrangement

    actually I can't think of any others, but is there an example of Apple getting burned by Google?

    • bjghknggkk

      today at 9:56 PM

      Android.

• cantalopes

  today at 10:25 PM

  Have you ever used anything that is on google cloud console? Or tried not to get randomly ratelimited with a single request to a vertex llm model? They are shooting themselves in the foot for solid 20 years, any of these players can compete with google in this frontier

  • operatingthetan

    today at 10:31 PM

    Google is playing the datacenter game differently because they have their own hardware.

• kiernanmcgowan

  today at 8:37 PM

  Slight counter point - claude code is basically the only developer tool that ever been happy to pay money for. Getting the entire software industry to give you $200/mo/person is quite the market.

  • chrisjj

    today at 10:30 PM

    > Getting the entire software industry to give you $200/mo/person is quite the market.

    Quite the fantasy, you mean.

  • renato_shira

    today at 10:04 PM

    this matches my experience. i'm building a mobile game solo and the amount of leverage i get from claude is wild, probably saves me 15-20 hours a week on stuff that would've required either a second person or just grinding through slowly.

    $200/mo is nothing compared to what that time is worth. and it keeps getting better with each model release, which is the opposite of what usually happens when you pay for developer tools (they get acquired, enshittified, or abandoned).

    the meta point about this funding round imo: competition between anthropic, openai, and google is the best thing happening for small builders right now. it keeps the tools improving fast and pricing competitive. if any one of them had a monopoly we'd be paying 10x for worse output.

• Waterluvian

  today at 9:44 PM

  The most efficient way Google could spend that money is probably to buy a company and not poke at it too much. I have no confidence that large rich companies can actually innovate beyond buying small innovators or spawning business units and not poking at them much.

• Ancalagon

  today at 8:15 PM

  how does any startup beat an incumbent?

  • Esophagus4

    today at 10:07 PM

    I think GP is probably implying that this particular vertical requires obscene amounts of capital to keep up, which makes it really hard for a startup if you’re going up against businesses with giant free cash flow machines.

    It’s the same reason Reid Hoffman sold his AI startup early… he realized he just couldn’t beat Google/FB/MSFT long term if it devolved into a money race.

• johntiger1

  today at 8:16 PM

  Google's only focus isn't on Gemini. Anthropic is do-or-die

  • IncreasePosts

    today at 9:34 PM

    Look at Sundar's most recent remarks and tell me Google's isn't only focusing on AI: https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/a...

    Basically "we have youtube subscribers" is the only thing that isn't all about AI, but even that i'm sure they're trying to figure out how to shoehorn AI into that product

  • sobkas

    today at 8:21 PM

    Also Theranos was do-or-die and we know how it ended.

    • infecto

      today at 8:23 PM

      I fail to see what that has to do with this?

      • sobkas

        today at 9:06 PM

        Just because something is in do-or-die situation doesn't mean that they have some kind of magical advantage over fat cat. Being in that situation means there is very real possibility of doing "die" part and we have lots of examples of them doing so.

    • postflopclarity

      today at 9:15 PM

      very different; not a relevant comparison

• beambot

  today at 9:38 PM

  The same way that Google+ never overtook Facebook

• nightski

  today at 9:57 PM

  How long is Google going to be able to keep selling search engine ads?

• pazimzadeh

  today at 10:08 PM

  just want google to have good web apps again, it's so bad on desktop

• bdangubic

  today at 8:17 PM

  Given the amount money that they are spending for vastly subpar products maybe they need to quadruple their capex

• bentt

  today at 9:00 PM

  I’d guess they want to outlast OpenAI and then get bought by Apple or Amazon.

• throwaway911282

  today at 8:59 PM

  Google has invested in Anthropic. I don't trust that Google will compete on fair grounds with Anthropic on coding. Their common enemy is OpenAI.

• rhubarbtree

  today at 10:05 PM

  Culture.

• rizpanjwani

  today at 10:03 PM

  Google is invested in Anthropic

> "It has been less than three years since Anthropic earned its first dollar in revenue. Today, our run-rate revenue is $14 billion, with this figure growing over 10x annually in each of those past three years."

Wild although not entirely surprising. Congrats, Anthropic.

• techblueberry

  today at 7:49 PM

  Next year 140 billion the following year 1.4 trillion, 14 trillion the year after that?

  • bix6

    today at 9:24 PM

    Better be otherwise it’s a 27+ year wait for breakeven!

    • disillusioned

      today at 9:39 PM

      27 year PE ratio is a value stock at this point

  • noupdates

    today at 7:57 PM

    Pay attention to the outflow of tech investment in the stock market. That money is going to move into OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs. The valuations will be as big you are thinking because the market believes these companies will represent an entire basket of startups.

    • marcyb5st

      today at 8:04 PM

      It Is more likely that people are cashing out very liquid assets (tech stocks) to pay back their loans in Yen as interest rates are rising over there.

      Tech stocks with all the hype are second only to crypto in terms of how easy and fast are to sell (hence BTC dropped and now tech stocks IMHO).

      Btw, I was too young to fully remember, but wasn't the year before the dot com crash also full of IPOs?

      • techblueberry

        today at 9:57 PM

        Apparently the last two times the Super Bowl Ads were dominated by Tech companies was 2000 for dotCom and 2022 for Crypto.

        • marcyb5st

          today at 10:08 PM

          That's a really interesting tidbit. Thanks for sharing.

          And thinking about it it makes sense since the decision to pay the outrageous rates for an ad during the Superbowl must be driven by strong emotions (confidence or desperation). In this case, considering there's no clear moat for any of the big players, I believe it's the latter.

    • candiddevmike

      today at 8:06 PM

      If your thesis was correct, why wouldn't some of those "outflows" go to GOOG or NVDA?

      • noupdates

        today at 8:13 PM

        They would. You can see how resilient GOOG has been during this recent draw-down, and how much growth it has had even as AI sells off.

        • bdangubic

          today at 8:21 PM

          AI sells off… if this is a selloff than I see what everyone is talking about when they are saying we in a bubble :)

      • serfo022

        today at 8:12 PM

        [dead]

        • p1esk

          today at 8:20 PM

          That’s harsh! But the alternative is to discuss economic theories on reddit.

    • koakuma-chan

      today at 8:09 PM

      And why would anyone participate in their IPOs? They would be crazily overvalued, like Figma or worse.

      • Ekaros

        today at 8:11 PM

        I really wonder is there even enough dump money from them to sell the stock they hold. Not to mention even raising any new capital... Is there really enough bag holders that will run after these stock with large enough piles of money?

      • laksjhdlka

        today at 8:24 PM

        To be fair, Facebook was at the time viewed by many as crazily overvalued.

    • dude250711

      today at 8:02 PM

      Might as well long NVDA?

      • noupdates

        today at 8:02 PM

        There are many bitter lessons ...

        • prewett

          today at 8:29 PM

          Could you be more specific? Because NVDA has a consistent 20 year growth of something like 400x and +30%/yr, so I don't think the bitter lessons are there.

• Forgeties79

  today at 7:59 PM

  I would hold off congratulating them until they’re actually in the black. They are still burning billions a year lol the revenue is impressive but their expenses are still solidly north of it.

  • MengerSponge

    today at 8:42 PM

    Don't worry about it: they'll make it up in volume

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXDxNCzUspM

• today at 8:00 PM

• JackSlateur

  today at 9:10 PM

  What are the benefits ?

  If you give me $1T to spend, I, too, can probably make $14B (this is a metaphor)

I wonder how good it is for companies to be allowed to grow so big and still be private? Would it makes sense to require any company with more than a billion dollar valuation to be subject to all the same SEC requirements that public companies are? Could companies be blocked from raising money once the reach a crazy valuation like $1 billion?

• kccqzy

  today at 9:39 PM

  That doesn’t make sense at all. The raison d’être of SEC is to protect regular mom-and-pop investors. A private company just doesn’t allow anyone to invest in them. Why should SEC rules apply? On what legal basis can you force a private company to divulge its financial details? Would you be happy if you, as an individual, have to divulge your account statements if your own net wealth reaches one million?

  • volkk

    today at 9:43 PM

    yeah it's a slippery slope forcing companies to go public at X valuation. who decides that? what number makes sense? etc. but i do think we need to somehow fix massively overpriced companies going public and dumping on retail

• bix6

  today at 9:21 PM

  It’s a major issue in VC. Main Street doesn’t get access until it’s time to offload. Prevents capital recycling for early stage as well.

• kooshball

  today at 9:57 PM

  there used to be rules that companies must be public if they have other 1000 investors. is this no longer the case?

Goldman Sachs recently stoked fear about software stocks due to claimed AI competition.

What if their strategy is this: slowly drive down software stocks, keep talking about AI, buy the downward market. Then cash in on the IPOs of OpenAI and Anthropic.

Then let OpenAI and Anthropic implode. Goldman Sachs had no problems underwriting webvan at the end of 1999, which then imploded in 2000.

Anyway, I just valued my dog at $1 billion post-money. You can buy it at pets.com.

• jrjeksjd8d

  today at 9:04 PM

  Matt Levine has put this forward in his newsletter - if you're moderately influential you can go on TV and tell people that "X industry will be dead in 10 years" because of AI and then profit from the inevitable stock dip.

  Because we live in the worst possible timeline the end result for AI companies does seem to be "too big to fail", where these massive investments will get foisted on working class people via a bailout or an IPO and index inclusion.

  • sequin

    today at 10:34 PM

    I doubt talking heads on the TV can move markets.

  • Esophagus4

    today at 10:11 PM

    His newsletter (and podcast) are fantastic.

• finolex1

  today at 9:12 PM

  You're attributing way too much intent to what is the viewpoint of some random analyst at Goldman Sachs (who doesn't even control any purse strings). A year ago there was another big hullabaloo when a GS team wrote a long post about how AI companies would never make enough revenue.

Kind of amusing that there is basically no mention of their original mission at all here.

• pbreit

  today at 7:57 PM

  What was their original mission?

  My sense is that startup mission statements are ~meaningless. Builders try to build great things that lots of other people will find valuable.

  • s_dev

    today at 8:02 PM

    >What was their original mission?

    Beat OpenAI. The Founders came from OpenAI so there was obviously some disagreement about the direction there or they simply wanted more control.

  • dude250711

    today at 8:00 PM

    To maximise shareholder value.

    • vessenes

      today at 8:23 PM

      It's a benefit corp

    • xvector

      today at 8:16 PM

      They've been very clear about their mission, they're doing more than anyone else when it comes to it, and if you've ever interviewed with them you'd know how critical it is to them.

      But I guess it's easier to make a glib comment than look these things up.

    • lenerdenator

      today at 8:04 PM

      Technically speaking, it's to maximize shareholder value while serving the public interest. They're a public benefit corporation.

      • longfacehorrace

        today at 9:17 PM

        OpenAI has "open" in their name but is closed off to public access and input

        Google used to have a motto "don't be evil"

        Who enforces the definition of language? Who demands compliance?

        Soon as we go down the path of policing and insistence on one true dogma, we veer into religious holy war type behavior.

        Obsession with semantics of syntax is a sort of theism even if the syntax and semantics do not refer to the commonly accepted tropes of a specific religion.

        • lenerdenator

          today at 9:30 PM

          In this case, it has to do with how they're classified under Delaware law as a corporate entity.

          I'm not a lawyer (I don't even play one on TV, damn you Odenkirk) so I can't tell you what that means as far as case law for companies getting punished for behaving badly, but in this case, there is supposedly some sort of legal backing for the classification.

  • saagarjha

    today at 8:16 PM

    Friendly AI

• VirusNewbie

  today at 9:44 PM

  Anthropic has one of the best moats of any business that's been created in the last 50 years.

  Numerous companies have tried and failed competing with SoTA foundational models. If Anthropic had no moat, Apple and Meta wouldn't be paying them billions for coding asistance.

  Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Nvidia would all have SoTA competitors to Claude. They all tried and have not produced a competitor.

  Instead you have three companies that stand alone making billions from foundational models.

$14B revenue run rate is the interesting number here.

• HarHarVeryFunny

  today at 8:44 PM

  Yeah, up from $1B a year ago.

  Two years ago, I considered investing in Anthropic when they had a valuation of around $18B and messed up by chickening out (it was available on some of the private investor platforms). Up 20x since then ...

  It was always obvious that Anthropic's focus on business/API usage had potential to scale faster than OpenAI's focus on ChatGPT, but the real kicker has been Claude Code (released a year ago).

  It'd be interesting to know how Anthropic's revenue splits between Claude Code, or coding in general, other API usage, and chat (which I assume is small).

  • Esophagus4

    today at 10:19 PM

    Eh, I think you made the best decision you could given the info you had.

    I’ve poked around on EquityZen and was shocked at how little information is available to investors. In some cases I did not even see pitch decks, let alone one of the first companies I looked at had its top Google result: CEO recently arrested for fraud and business is almost worthless now.

    Unless you are willing to take a blind punt or have insider information, those platforms are opaque minefields and I don’t fault you for not investing.

    Matt Levine has a fun investment test: when presented with an opportunity, you should always ask, “and why are you offering it to me?”

    Meaning, by the time it gets offered to retail investors (even accredited ones are retail) we’re getting the scraps that no one else wants.

  • winfortheworld

    today at 8:48 PM

    what are the private investor platform you mentioned ? and what are the requirements to join in?

    • modeless

      today at 8:51 PM

      Hiive and Forge Global are the ones I know of. You must be an "accredited investor" which means nothing at all except that you have a million dollars or make $200k/yr.

      • throwaway911282

        today at 9:01 PM

        Like you can buy shares of Anthropic as long as you prove you make over 200K? That easy? Shouldn't they approve of the purchase? Sorry, noob in this space!

        • bombcar

          today at 10:02 PM

          They have to approve and it's not as simple - it's just that if you make $200k a year or have $1m in the bank, the government assumes you're a knowledgeable investor and allows you to bypass certain protections.

          If you are NOT knowledgeable and simply have money ... well it'll soon be parted.

        • bix6

          today at 9:28 PM

          The secondary platform verifies you and then you indicate interest. If there’s a seller you may get to buy. Company may ROFR. Priority goes to bigger buyers.

    • joshribakoff

      today at 8:52 PM

      EquityBee got me investors to exercise my Brex options, in exchange for giving up some small beta

Soon we will lack letters for funding rounds!

• endymi0n

  today at 7:54 PM

  G is tame. Wait until you hear of Databricks’ Series K…

  https://www.thesaasnews.com/news/databricks-raises-1b-series...

  • kevstev

    today at 9:19 PM

    A few years back, well ok maybe almost ten now, but regardless- a recruiter reached out to me about a role at a "series G" company like it was a selling point, and I was just kinda like ok maybe thats signaling its relatively stable and can raise money, but at the same time, that's a lot of rounds to have preferences ensure unprivileged shareholders get nothing, and also to have most of the hockey stick growth already tapped out.

    This was in the middle of the boom when companies were fighting over talent, so I found it odd.

• teeray

  today at 8:05 PM

  Emojis would be far more appropriate for AI startups

• gedy

  today at 8:10 PM

  They could stop at F and treat it as hexadecimal by adding digits: Series 4F, etc

• rileymichael

  today at 9:11 PM

  considering their series F was only ~5 months ago this doesn't seem too far-fetched!

Oh dang, no wonder they’re auto coding so much garbage in public (crap c compiler, crap browser, crap salesforce).

• strange_quark

  today at 8:13 PM

  The timing of the Claude Code guerilla marketing campaign that seems to have started around new years is now making much more sense.

  • heavyset_go

    today at 8:38 PM

    It's wild watching people fall for it

How are they not overvalued? At some point OSS will be sufficient for most businesses, what then?

• ibejoeb

  today at 9:57 PM

  >OSS will be sufficient for most businesses

  Only for well defined tasks. There's not really a practical upper bound. We will keep throwing more complex tasks at it to the extent that it can handle them. Like if you just need fancy OCR, then a specific model will probably suffice, but there will be an appetite for human- or superhuman-level intelligence that never gets tired and has no rights.

• nikcub

  today at 9:20 PM

  Funny I consider this valuation modest considering what the max extent of the investment thesis is here.

  SaaS and legal market caps have already contracted a multiple of the combined OpenAI + Anthropic valuations just based on the _threat_ of what they may be able to accomplish.

  They'll have the data + knowledge edge over open alternatives and be able to implement + deploy (see the story about Anthropic employees being at GS for 6 months already[0])

  [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/anthropic-goldman-sachs-ai-m...

  • bix6

    today at 9:34 PM

    What’s your max extent? I was just doing some napkin math to think about where they’ll cap out.

• mcmcmc

  today at 8:07 PM

  They’ll become commodity AI compute providers while training and selling premium foundation models.

• phreeza

  today at 8:03 PM

  These companies are spending billions on custom datasets for a gazillion of valuable tasks and are clamping down on exfil for distillation. It's not guaranteed open source models will continue to keep pace.

  • marcyb5st

    today at 8:11 PM

    China might purchase the data and train their models just to make the AI bubble pop. A few billions to throw a wrench in your competing superpower economy might be totally worth it

  • CuriouslyC

    today at 8:06 PM

    And yet open models have been tailing closer lately?

• Yizahi

  today at 9:13 PM

  Then they will fall back on the selling their other real competitive products - hardware accelerators, phones and PCs, cloud storage and cloud compute, enterprise software, databases, operating systems, office and media suits... Oh wait...

• vessenes

  today at 8:24 PM

  What do you value a company at that has gotten to $14b in revenue in 3 years and has 60%+ margin on inference? Just out of curiosity.

  • JackSlateur

    today at 9:15 PM

    60%+ margin on inference: source ?

    + r&d costs

    Of course, if one does not "pay" for investment, benefits are easily made ..

  • xvector

    today at 8:30 PM

    I am struggling with this because I have an Anthropic offer vs another equivalent offer that is all cash.

    But project out forwards.

    - What happens when Google builds a similar model? Or even Meta, as far behind as they are? They have more than Anthropic in cash flow to pour into these models.

    - What happens when OSS is "enough" for most cases? Why would anyone pay 60% margins on inference?

    What is Anthropic's moat? The UX is nice, but it can be copied. And other companies will have similarly intelligent models eventually. Margins will then be a race to the bottom, and the real winners will be GPU infra.

    • underyx

      today at 9:16 PM

      If you have an offer, you can and should ask this question of whomever you're coordinating with. They will give you an honest answer.

    • jrjeksjd8d

      today at 9:06 PM

      I've been in this situation before. Anthropic has a stupid business model but the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. If you get in there you will be aligned with people who structurally do not lose.

    • fragmede

      today at 9:29 PM

      Big picture, sure. We can talk about the millions that corporations will make and who's going to do what. But you're a person. $1 million in options is probably meaningful for you. Companies aren't IPOing, but the secret is that they're still paying employees cash for their options. SpaceX employees have had what's called a tender, which means they get to sell some of their hypothetical SpaceX options for cold hard cash in the bank that you can use to pay your mortgage. There's zero guarantee that Anthropic will do such a thing before the bubble bursts, but if they do, and you're there, who cares about a software company moat when you have enough money to buy a castle in Napa and pay to have a real actual moat with water in it and crocodiles, if that's what you want.

      Others are made of different stuff, and are going to go right back to work, even though they could go off to a beach for the rest of forever somewhere.

      • xvector

        today at 10:19 PM

        > who cares about a software company moat when you have enough money to buy a castle in Napa and pay to have a real actual moat with water in it and crocodiles, if that's what you want.

        Doesn't this require their private market valuations to go well into the trillions?

  • Hamuko

    today at 8:36 PM

    Is their overall margin also about 60% too? Or something saner like 30%?

    • lotsofpulp

      today at 9:10 PM

      Their overall margin is negative.

When will we see the first $1T valuation for a private company? What do you call a herd of 1000 unicorns together?

• ben_w

  today at 8:47 PM

  > What do you call a herd of 1000 unicorns together?

  As millipede, clearly therefore millicorn.

  • i7l

    today at 9:24 PM

    The collective noun for a group of unicorns in AI is known as a hallucination, as in: a hallucination of unicorns.

• vanshg

  today at 8:52 PM

  We already have: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/feb/02/elon-musk-sp...

Annoyed parent voice: What happened to the $13 billion I gave you 4 months ago?

• bdangubic

  today at 9:07 PM

  check your credit card statement Dad

Is everyone competing to steal Google's ad cash-cow? This is the only way these investments make sense.

• Hamuko

  today at 8:35 PM

  I think the idea is to reduce labor costs by replacing the human workers.

  • 2OEH8eoCRo0

    today at 8:43 PM

    I haven't used it to replace workers though, only to replace Google search. My company is pushing copilot but it's only $16/user/mo. Hardly lucrative and no moat.

    • xvector

      today at 8:58 PM

      OTOH my company spends well into the $hundreds/user/day on Claude.

      • JackSlateur

        today at 9:16 PM

        They are insane

"Post-money" is the euphemism for the glorious end of capitalism, when we will be paying in corporate scrip, Arasaka-style? :)

• sa-code

  today at 10:07 PM

  "Post-money valuation is a way of expressing the value of a company after an investment has been made" [1]

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-money_valuation

They did say they were going to cover the electricity bills...

> The number of customers spending over $100,000 annually on Claude (as represented by run-rate revenue) has grown 7x in the past year.

Looks like major uptake from businesses. But all these articles keep saying there isn’t any actual value creation?

Anthropic is the clear category leader in enterprise AI

Citation needed.

• rf15

  today at 7:53 PM

  As the clear category leader in HN posting, I agree

  • dude250711

    today at 8:04 PM

    Google has an edge, always a "personal experience" comment about leaving OpenAI/Anthropic in the dust every time new model gets posted.

• otterley

  today at 7:44 PM

  It's marketing copy--I wouldn't expect them to say otherwise.

• dev_l1x_be

  today at 7:50 PM

  It is quite obviously Microsoft. They use the same (in my dictionary illegal) tactic they did with Teams.

• DANmode

  today at 7:44 PM

  Microsoft engineers use their offerings over OpenAI - their partner.

  That isn’t nothing.

  • stonogo

    today at 8:21 PM

    It is approximately nothing, since lots of MS engineers use Apple products too.

    • DANmode

      today at 8:56 PM

      Apple does pretty well for themselves - are you sure that’s not a positive signal for Anthropic?

• techblueberry

  today at 7:50 PM

  I mean, I do think it is true, I’m not sure if this is like fastest toddler in the preschool or whatever.

• nimchimpsky

  today at 7:54 PM

  [dead]

Absolutely wild valuation given their lack of a moat isn't it?

• bonesss

  today at 7:59 PM

  Microsoft is deeply entwined in OpenAI and has obvious reasons to dogfood, yet their people are using Anthropic solutions.

  Valuation behemoth OpenAI has been forced by the market to use Anthropic standards a couple times, having no comparable solutions of their own.

  … I can see it.

  • CuriouslyC

    today at 8:08 PM

    Anthropic's marketing somehow punches hard. Not sure why, but the stuff they do sticks. Not because the products are great, but because the way they communicate about it gives people the right feeling. They do have legitimately the best coding model now for most tasks, and for narrative prose, but the marketing stuck and people stan'd them even when they were trailing.

    • zemo

      today at 9:56 PM

      > Anthropic's marketing somehow punches hard. Not sure why

      The fish rots from the head and marketing depends on being relatable.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMAg8_yf9zA

      Take a scroll through the comments.

    • LunaSea

      today at 8:30 PM

      Anthropic develops tools for developers and power users which are the actual people doing the evangelizing and marketing for them.

• rconti

  today at 7:58 PM

  It's Web 2.0 all over again. No moat, winner-take-all (economies-of-scale/network-effect). Just have to out-spend everyone else, and then figure out whether it was worth it all after you win.

• tyre

  today at 7:54 PM

  Having a cutting edge model that requires tens of billions of dollars to train + a massive concentration of talent and experience + brand + one of, if not the best, coding experiences in Claude Code

  These are all moats.

  • 9cb14c1ec0

    today at 8:39 PM

    The moat seems rather small right now. There are 7 different companies represented in the top 10 models on openrouter.

  • fermentation

    today at 8:00 PM

    Couldn’t their excellent model and coding experience generate another excellent coding CLI tool?

  • wasmainiac

    today at 7:59 PM

    > tens of billions of dollars to train

    Source??

  • rconti

    today at 8:01 PM

    > cutting edge model that requires tens of billions of dollars to train

    seems like there are a lot of those out there these days, and the costs are falling

    > a massive concentration of talent and experience

    Apparently 3000 employees? There's plenty of talent to be found elsewhere. Plus employees can be hired away.

    > brand

    meh.

    > one of, if not the best, coding experiences

    Seems easy enough to replicate, given how quickly they built it.

• selfawareMammal

  today at 7:48 PM

  Ain't that for the entire ai field.

• hvb2

  today at 7:50 PM

  FOMO, pretty much

• Hamuko

  today at 7:54 PM

  They have a moat on hype.

• lenerdenator

  today at 8:07 PM

  At least from the software engineer pleb perspective, their moat is that their tools seem to work well more often than not. I wasn't comfortable with the idea of using GitHub CoPilot as our GenAI solution at work, and apparently that was a widespread feeling, because we switched to Claude Code, and it's been a relatively smooth transition from manual coding to GenAI agentic loops.

• andrewmcwatters

  today at 7:46 PM

  [dead]

• nimchimpsky

  today at 7:58 PM

  [dead]

it's crazy that Google is spending something like 4x this in a year just for capex

wonder how much of that $30B will make it their way and pay that down

• verdverm

  today at 9:39 PM

  has me wondering if Anthropic is one of those confidential TPU buyers