Meanwhile in the real world https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-recorded-net-loss...

If they had 100xed their revenue over the past eighteen months nobody would be skeptical. Instead they 17xed their revenue, and Q3 2026 is the first quarter in over a year that revenue hasn't doubled...

I stand corrected. ARR in Jan 2025 was $1 billion, and ARR now is ~ $75 billion. A mere 75x. You’re right, they’re doomed.

Sorry, I didn't understand that by 'eighteen months' you meant 'two years.' I'm sure if you cherry-pick a number even father back you can make your argument that much stronger!

I picked Jan since that’s when DS R1 first came out and I started hearing this narrative.

And unless my math skills are completely off, it’s about 21 months, not two years, but fair enough. What 18 month period in that range would you like to consider as validating the ridiculous idea that open weight models are going to eat Anthropic’s lunch?

My point is that you're not advancing your argument by considering performance on that long a timeframe. The people worried that Anthropic won't hit $1.5T are concerning themselves with velocity of revenue growth, which has slowed. Harping on absolute increases over the long range doesn't contradict that fact.

It also doesn't do much to disprove the OP's argument, which is that the actual models aren't what drive growth. I personally think it doesn't particularly matter which models Anthropic is running because the tools like Claude are what people are actually paying for. Anthropic, at this point, is so far ahead of the competition in the tooling around models that they can probably just start running Deepseek products directly and people would still pay them.

Q3 revenue growth slowed, but the end of Q3 was also right when Opus 5.5 came out. So we'll see.