The world doesn't make sense to me. I use 5.6 Luna. Deepseek v4 flash 0731. And kimi k3. Don't even need claude anymore at their insane prices for anything I do.
If you're primarily writing code yourself or meticulously reviewing the output from agents, then you're right. However, if you tried to have any of those models one-shot an app or do some highly agentic work, they would certainly fail. That's the future people are looking towards with these valuations: when its no longer economical for humans to write or even understand code, just let the models drive because they are superhuman at it. Not saying we are there today, but that's when you really start to see the benefit of more expensive models. Luna or Deepseek flash would never find any of the mathematical discoveries or security exploits that the larger models can find.
Claude is certainly able to make a superhuman mess. All of its efficacy still hinges upon good architecture and programming principles, which do not seem to be instilled in the model by anything other than luck
I'm not convinced that one-shotting things is anything other than a vanity-metric.
Maybe in the distant future where quickly building a visualisation to help explain some concept would be valuable to one shot quickly - but "One shotting an app" is ridiculous because app development (or any development) is never "build it and then finish" but is an interative process, testing feedback, user feedback, and even app-creator communication ambiguity means being able to "one shot an app" is pretty worthless
But.. what is it that anthropic does that cannot be replicated by open models teamed up with open source? Heck open source even has cheap AI to help write the code now.
What enterprises pay for is all that matters. They pay insane amounts for a lot of things I would never do personally, but I'm not the target demographic in those cases.
Right, and it's often very sane. If you're paying $250k/year for a software engineer, it likely makes sense to have them spend $10k/year on tokens from the best available model rather than trying to save a few thousand with random Chinese models that may or may not be good enough.
While not today, very soon every company, of every complexity will run local models. It's not in a companies interest to hand over its domain expertise, data, and proprietary IP for a increase in productivity. Most will quickly realize it makes sense to run their own weights. This will be commonplace once tooling and training infrastructure is commoditized.
Let's try a thought experiment. It's not subsidized. It's not "worth" the tens of times it costs if accessed through API. Let's drop the subsidy word, they're selling you a product, and they're trying to sell other people a similar product at 30x the price with some excuses. If either (or both) turns out to be unsustainable, they haven't been subsidizing you, they just had a crap business model (or a perfectly good one, if the goal was an inflated valuation, an IPO and then a crash once the losses are socialized).
They might raise the price, but I don't think they will ever get rid of the $20 tier. It is way too consumer friendly and likely has the highest percentage of users that aren't abusing their quota limits. A layperson will be extremely hard pressed to create an API key, know what to do with it, put money in their account. People want an easy subscription.
200usd/mo for Claude gives me tens of thousands of dollars of value.
API prices are paid by companies getting tens of millions of dollars of value.
In normal life money is the key constraint; buy this don't buy that etc. - whereas in VC funded companies the constraint is time. If you as a founder get funding and don't spend it fast enough you put yourself at serious risk of being replaced.
When enough of the world operates on that principle it creates a highly price insensitive market and that then can support a ton of ideas and experiments, some of which turn out to be really really good. It's a wild way to do innovation but it's been working well for decades.
$200/mo of Claude may give you what would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to create in 2023, but the value of what it creates isn't there anymore. It should be compared against what it would cost to create with other tools, not against the cost of you doing it by hand.
Otherwise would be like justifying an obviously overpriced car, because "it saves me so much compared to carrying things thousands of miles by hand!"
> 200usd/mo for Claude gives me tens of thousands of dollars of value.
That may well be true, but the same tens of thousands of dollars of value can be purchased for a fraction of the 200usd Anthropic asks.... therefore why not?
And even beyond pure monetary considerations, it often refuses to help as soon as its trigger happy safeguards kick in, can't debug a lot of code before it decides to stop helping IME.
It takes a big leap of faith for real companies with a real P&L to hand out token budgets in the thousands far and wide across their teams. The ROI is very easy difficult to demonstrate.
I've been thinking about it a lot and I think there's going to be commoditization of tokens. No local models - the hardware to run at scale is too complicated for companies that are reluctant to even run a local file server - and not wholesale run to Chinese suppliers (due to IP considerations mainly).
I think the winners in the coding/office work space will be intermediaries who can sell reasonable quality tokens at cost plus.
It's the same reason "real" companies don't hand out their employees fully decked Macbook Pros or don't provide $500k TC packages as a norm: they are fine with "good enough" and "good ROI". And that's not going to happen with Claude API pricing where it is.
Another field is API pricing for things that are not coding, like automated systems doing analysis of things. I think there it's a real race to the bottom, including - or even mostly - direct sourcing from China (just like business do with their real goods today).
> "Could they (Anthropic) get a $2 trillion valuation, yeah they could and I just wonder if it would stay there over time"
Can someone explain exactly how the market can in any sense support not one but two trillion dollar valuations (referencing spacex as the first)? (I imagine openai will likely be in the same ballpark) genuinely we're reaching "elementary levels of big funny number" in the market.
They are going to have to monetize their customers to try to reach that goal. So that means charging as much as the market can handle. They have a couple of problems though called OpenAI, SpaceX, Google, Chinese models and Open weights.
With the (unknown?) blend of consumer vs enterprise customers, what do "experts" project their margins to be around?
Some notes from me researching trying to answer my own question:
> Wall Street experts and financial research firms project Anthropic’s current blended gross margins to be in the mid-40% to mid-60% range, with internal company forecasts aiming for a software-like 77% gross margin by 2028
> Anthropic’s revenue is heavily dominated by enterprise and developer customers (roughly 75% to 85% of total revenue).
> Premium Token Pricing: Enterprise and API clients generate 3 to 5 times more revenue per token than consumer users.
Idk, but for me it is ridiculous, people still doubt these valuations. SpaceX was of course non sense. But to value those companies lower than 1 trillion???
Please, link some source to change my mind.
Anyone believing that this company will surpass Nvidia's revenue in 2028 is seeking a lot of exit liquidity to dump hundreds of millions of their stock after the first earnings release.
> The projection dwarfs the $47 billion revenue "run rate," reflecting the firm's current pace of business, that the company publicized as recently as May, and shows the scale of growth investors are being asked to underwrite.
Never do they account for competition, risks, delays, lawsuits and geo-political issues. Seems like this is massaged to get tens of millions of retail traders holding an expensive designer bag that is riddled with holes.
I love Claude but as soon as there is a viable replacement and I get around to it, I’m gone. I have zero loyalty to a chatbot and when the interface is just text the cost of switching is up to my personal whims.
I switched to codex after using Claude for a year. Faster, cheaper and smart (not sure smarter) but it likes to do things by itself without asking for clarification.
> Anthropic has projected revenue of at least $10.9 billion for the second quarter of 2026, more than double the previous quarter, on track for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million.
The world doesn't make sense to me. I use 5.6 Luna. Deepseek v4 flash 0731. And kimi k3. Don't even need claude anymore at their insane prices for anything I do.
If you're primarily writing code yourself or meticulously reviewing the output from agents, then you're right. However, if you tried to have any of those models one-shot an app or do some highly agentic work, they would certainly fail. That's the future people are looking towards with these valuations: when its no longer economical for humans to write or even understand code, just let the models drive because they are superhuman at it. Not saying we are there today, but that's when you really start to see the benefit of more expensive models. Luna or Deepseek flash would never find any of the mathematical discoveries or security exploits that the larger models can find.
Claude is certainly able to make a superhuman mess. All of its efficacy still hinges upon good architecture and programming principles, which do not seem to be instilled in the model by anything other than luck
I'm not convinced that one-shotting things is anything other than a vanity-metric.
Maybe in the distant future where quickly building a visualisation to help explain some concept would be valuable to one shot quickly - but "One shotting an app" is ridiculous because app development (or any development) is never "build it and then finish" but is an interative process, testing feedback, user feedback, and even app-creator communication ambiguity means being able to "one shot an app" is pretty worthless
But.. what is it that anthropic does that cannot be replicated by open models teamed up with open source? Heck open source even has cheap AI to help write the code now.
What enterprises pay for is all that matters. They pay insane amounts for a lot of things I would never do personally, but I'm not the target demographic in those cases.
Right, and it's often very sane. If you're paying $250k/year for a software engineer, it likely makes sense to have them spend $10k/year on tokens from the best available model rather than trying to save a few thousand with random Chinese models that may or may not be good enough.
The Chinese companies will need to pay their bills eventually too.
> The Chinese companies will need to pay their bills eventually too.
What bills? Deepseek has been profitable for long time.
Their purchasing costs are much lower proportionally.
Chiba has cheaper electricity and a more capable grid for the industrial type usage levels they need to drive.
Data centers don't really cost less in China. Perhaps even more due to trade restrictions and the difficulty of smuggling the chips in.
Electricity is a small part of the bill.
Wouldn't enterprises rather run their own models locally?
While not today, very soon every company, of every complexity will run local models. It's not in a companies interest to hand over its domain expertise, data, and proprietary IP for a increase in productivity. Most will quickly realize it makes sense to run their own weights. This will be commonplace once tooling and training infrastructure is commoditized.
Enterprises don't even want to self-host webservers, and those are about a thousand times easier to do than self-hosting an AI model
In many things in life it’s wise to think further than just what suits your needs personally
> Don't even need claude anymore at their insane prices for anything I do.
What insane price is that? Pro is $20 per month. Same price as a Netflix ad free sub.
Are they going to get to $200B revenue in 2028 at $20/month? That's a billion monthly subscribers. In 2028.
Until they stop to subsidize.
Let's try a thought experiment. It's not subsidized. It's not "worth" the tens of times it costs if accessed through API. Let's drop the subsidy word, they're selling you a product, and they're trying to sell other people a similar product at 30x the price with some excuses. If either (or both) turns out to be unsustainable, they haven't been subsidizing you, they just had a crap business model (or a perfectly good one, if the goal was an inflated valuation, an IPO and then a crash once the losses are socialized).
They might raise the price, but I don't think they will ever get rid of the $20 tier. It is way too consumer friendly and likely has the highest percentage of users that aren't abusing their quota limits. A layperson will be extremely hard pressed to create an API key, know what to do with it, put money in their account. People want an easy subscription.
200usd/mo for Claude gives me tens of thousands of dollars of value.
API prices are paid by companies getting tens of millions of dollars of value.
In normal life money is the key constraint; buy this don't buy that etc. - whereas in VC funded companies the constraint is time. If you as a founder get funding and don't spend it fast enough you put yourself at serious risk of being replaced.
When enough of the world operates on that principle it creates a highly price insensitive market and that then can support a ton of ideas and experiments, some of which turn out to be really really good. It's a wild way to do innovation but it's been working well for decades.
It doesn't, though.
$200/mo of Claude may give you what would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to create in 2023, but the value of what it creates isn't there anymore. It should be compared against what it would cost to create with other tools, not against the cost of you doing it by hand.
Otherwise would be like justifying an obviously overpriced car, because "it saves me so much compared to carrying things thousands of miles by hand!"
> 200usd/mo for Claude gives me tens of thousands of dollars of value.
That may well be true, but the same tens of thousands of dollars of value can be purchased for a fraction of the 200usd Anthropic asks.... therefore why not?
And even beyond pure monetary considerations, it often refuses to help as soon as its trigger happy safeguards kick in, can't debug a lot of code before it decides to stop helping IME.
It takes a big leap of faith for real companies with a real P&L to hand out token budgets in the thousands far and wide across their teams. The ROI is very easy difficult to demonstrate.
I've been thinking about it a lot and I think there's going to be commoditization of tokens. No local models - the hardware to run at scale is too complicated for companies that are reluctant to even run a local file server - and not wholesale run to Chinese suppliers (due to IP considerations mainly).
I think the winners in the coding/office work space will be intermediaries who can sell reasonable quality tokens at cost plus. It's the same reason "real" companies don't hand out their employees fully decked Macbook Pros or don't provide $500k TC packages as a norm: they are fine with "good enough" and "good ROI". And that's not going to happen with Claude API pricing where it is.
Another field is API pricing for things that are not coding, like automated systems doing analysis of things. I think there it's a real race to the bottom, including - or even mostly - direct sourcing from China (just like business do with their real goods today).
paying for API calls gives you no such deal hack.
I walk to work and ride a bicycle in my free time, don’t see why anybody would need a hatchback or semi truck or build rockets. Idiots
Is the market for the "rockets" enough to justify what these frontier labs are spending yearly?
> "Could they (Anthropic) get a $2 trillion valuation, yeah they could and I just wonder if it would stay there over time"
Can someone explain exactly how the market can in any sense support not one but two trillion dollar valuations (referencing spacex as the first)? (I imagine openai will likely be in the same ballpark) genuinely we're reaching "elementary levels of big funny number" in the market.
A $2tn IPO does mean $2tn materialized out of nowhere. What matters is how big the liquid market is, and that is a much smaller number.
Apple has a $4.5 trillion valuation, and it just makes pretty consumer widgets. The global B2B economy is massive.
Well, if Anthropic actually makes $200B revenue in 2028 then that valuation is justified, depending on how fat their margins are.
They are going to have to monetize their customers to try to reach that goal. So that means charging as much as the market can handle. They have a couple of problems though called OpenAI, SpaceX, Google, Chinese models and Open weights.
With the (unknown?) blend of consumer vs enterprise customers, what do "experts" project their margins to be around?
Some notes from me researching trying to answer my own question:
> Wall Street experts and financial research firms project Anthropic’s current blended gross margins to be in the mid-40% to mid-60% range, with internal company forecasts aiming for a software-like 77% gross margin by 2028
> Anthropic’s revenue is heavily dominated by enterprise and developer customers (roughly 75% to 85% of total revenue).
> Premium Token Pricing: Enterprise and API clients generate 3 to 5 times more revenue per token than consumer users.
Net is estimated to be between 10% and 30%
Idk, but for me it is ridiculous, people still doubt these valuations. SpaceX was of course non sense. But to value those companies lower than 1 trillion??? Please, link some source to change my mind.
Anyone believing that this company will surpass Nvidia's revenue in 2028 is seeking a lot of exit liquidity to dump hundreds of millions of their stock after the first earnings release.
> The projection dwarfs the $47 billion revenue "run rate," reflecting the firm's current pace of business, that the company publicized as recently as May, and shows the scale of growth investors are being asked to underwrite.
Never do they account for competition, risks, delays, lawsuits and geo-political issues. Seems like this is massaged to get tens of millions of retail traders holding an expensive designer bag that is riddled with holes.
I love Claude but as soon as there is a viable replacement and I get around to it, I’m gone. I have zero loyalty to a chatbot and when the interface is just text the cost of switching is up to my personal whims.
I switched to codex after using Claude for a year. Faster, cheaper and smart (not sure smarter) but it likes to do things by itself without asking for clarification.
It's here already, called chatgpt 5.6 sol
me too except mine is called Claudia and I think she is really sweet and understands me. ;O
What market size do they think AI will be in 2028 to give that prognosis.
I cannot read the article. Does it say anything about profit?
> Anthropic has projected revenue of at least $10.9 billion for the second quarter of 2026, more than double the previous quarter, on track for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million.
Not a single mention. It’s all „revenue”. And as the downvoters are surely aware: profit != revenue.