Tortoise and Hare

Anthropic

Anthropic’s revenue run rate just topped $30 billion — that’s ahead of OpenAI, depending on how you count

The Claude maker’s revenue run rate has tripled in three months, as Dario Amodei’s firm takes the software world by storm.

Hyunsoo Rim

4/8/26 6:50AM

Anthropic said Monday that its annual revenue run rate has topped $30 billion, more than tripling from the ~$9 billion reported at the end of 2025. That places the Claude maker ahead of OpenAI, at least on paper, which disclosed roughly $24 billion in ARR at the end of March — a remarkable leapfrogging that would have seemed unthinkable just six months ago.

The jump came alongside the announcement of an expanded partnership with Google and Broadcom, which will give Anthropic access to 3.5 gigawatts of AI compute capacity starting in 2027 to help meet surging demand for its Claude products. The company’s latest model, Mythos, is already turning heads.

Over 1,000 enterprise customers are now spending over $1 million annually, more than double the ~500 customers in February.

Still, as remarkable as Anthropic’s near-vertical growth looks, the Claude maker may not have actually surged past its rival in the AI revenue race, since the comparison isn’t perfectly apples to apples.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic sell their AI models through cloud partners such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, which take a slice of revenues generated through their platforms. But the two account for those sales differently. According to The Information, Anthropic records the full amount a cloud customer pays as revenue, later counting the partners’ cut as an expense. OpenAI, by contrast, records what it actually receives after the cloud provider takes its share — at least in the case of Azure, its primary cloud partner.

In fact, The Information estimates Anthropic could pay roughly $1.9 billion to cloud providers this year and as much as $6.4 billion in 2027, based on the startup’s most optimistic forecasts, meaning the revenue gap with OpenAI could be narrower than it appears.

Beyond the revenue race, both AI startups are burning cash at historic rates, with the ChatGPT maker expecting to burn through a staggering $218 billion between 2026 and 2029 — about 23x what Tesla burned during its most cash-intensive years, and roughly equivalent to the GDP of Ukraine.

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

6/17/26

Companies are getting AI chatbots to smear their competitors

The race to influence AI chatbots is leading to some companies to adopt shady competitive tactics.

Tom Jones6/17/26

Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

Gold Tesla Cybercabs are piling up, but they’re not picking up passengers yet

Low-volume production started in April. Now people are noticing them more and more in the wild.

Rani Molla6/15/26

Millie Giles

TAKING ACCOUNTS

6/15/26

Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

Jon Keegan6/15/26

Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5