I am technically not saying that. I am taking off from the parent comment and speculating.
Their data from September is leaked via IPO preview, and October is not yet complete, so how can someone even project that?
// I am a techie, not a finance guy, so apart from public chatter, no inside knowledge.
And I do feel their IPO is being rushed before anyone has enough information to make up their mind. The VCs or private equity have given them a lot of money and want to cash out. When the revenue does slow down, any investor should pause to take a look at whether they can right the ship, or has the landscape itself changed.
Their revenue taps, product releases and marketing campaigns were all strategic: to be able to show nice numbers in the financials.
Once they stop playing games with quality of output of these models and revenue's shrink - they will be in deep deep trouble. They are hoping they will conjure up a break through with the IPO proceeds.
The flattening part is not reported, but based on estimates from a company called TickerTrends. If they were correct it would imply a sudden and unusual departure from some incredibly impressive growth. Even more unusual given the release of their industry leading Opus/Sonnet/Haiku. Something to watch but I would not consider that authoritative, and would not invest based on that either.
Opem models catching up in capabilities to do more and more tasks would easily explain it, there is a reason OpenRouter got sold for 7.5 bil, the money is in selling shovels and price per token, not chasing the frontier
The impressive growth is plausible, but it also rhymes with "bubble". There is obviously a value proposition in there, but I'm skeptical it's a trillion-dollar one. It's a machine for turning electricity and silicon into powerpoint and spotify slop
I partly agree. In support of your scepticism, I also think the frontier labs are overvalued. The expensive part which is not currently priced into the subscriptions is the training. Inference is usually profitable now - at least from what we can tell from industry reports.
Where this bubble differs from the dot-com bubble is that valuations have very strong, organic user demand behind them. In 1999, prototype websites with few customers were getting IPOs worth hundreds of millions. This time, demand is insatiable. Frontier mdoels also has very low global penetration, relatively speaking, so the TAM permits exponentially more sales, in theory.
However the risks are numerous for these labs. Foremost is that Chinese labs are able to easily distill frontier models. A tiny fraction of the cost of training, and they have a close approximation. Second, models are getting much more efficient per task. Companies are already discovering what "good enough" looks like, and it often ends up being much cheaper than what Anthropic and OpenAI are selling. This will only accelerate.
My investment thesis is bullish on the entire AI stack except the frontier labs. I think power generation is going to see huge demand. Ditto for infrastructure and data centers. Ditto for the products and services created by these models.
I don't have the numbers in front of me but could have sworn I had seen quarterly revenue growth rates dropping drastically over the last year or so. Still a strong growth rate, but much lower than prior growth rates.
Edit: Data because silent down votes are useless, Anthropic Q2 2026 grew 147% while Q3 grew 45%
Yes but its growth rates with respect to expenditures, and in particular capital expenditures (R&D etc), which we have no idea about.
Gross margins here are irrelevant: if they can't charge a high enough price to cover all expenditures and rely on cash raised via fund-raises, they are not financially healthy.
[–] stingraycharles 4 days ago
[–] kshacker 4 days ago
Their data from September is leaked via IPO preview, and October is not yet complete, so how can someone even project that?
// I am a techie, not a finance guy, so apart from public chatter, no inside knowledge.
And I do feel their IPO is being rushed before anyone has enough information to make up their mind. The VCs or private equity have given them a lot of money and want to cash out. When the revenue does slow down, any investor should pause to take a look at whether they can right the ship, or has the landscape itself changed.
[–] eeedda 4 days ago
Their revenue taps, product releases and marketing campaigns were all strategic: to be able to show nice numbers in the financials.
Once they stop playing games with quality of output of these models and revenue's shrink - they will be in deep deep trouble. They are hoping they will conjure up a break through with the IPO proceeds.
Let's see.
[–] flowerthoughts 4 days ago
https://techstartups.com/2026/10/15/anthropics-q3-revenue-hi...
[–] Gareth321 4 days ago
[–] InsidiousWombat 3 days ago
[–] psd1 4 days ago
[–] Gareth321 4 days ago
Where this bubble differs from the dot-com bubble is that valuations have very strong, organic user demand behind them. In 1999, prototype websites with few customers were getting IPOs worth hundreds of millions. This time, demand is insatiable. Frontier mdoels also has very low global penetration, relatively speaking, so the TAM permits exponentially more sales, in theory.
However the risks are numerous for these labs. Foremost is that Chinese labs are able to easily distill frontier models. A tiny fraction of the cost of training, and they have a close approximation. Second, models are getting much more efficient per task. Companies are already discovering what "good enough" looks like, and it often ends up being much cheaper than what Anthropic and OpenAI are selling. This will only accelerate.
My investment thesis is bullish on the entire AI stack except the frontier labs. I think power generation is going to see huge demand. Ditto for infrastructure and data centers. Ditto for the products and services created by these models.
[–] _heimdall 4 days ago
Edit: Data because silent down votes are useless, Anthropic Q2 2026 grew 147% while Q3 grew 45%
[–] eeedda 4 days ago
Gross margins here are irrelevant: if they can't charge a high enough price to cover all expenditures and rely on cash raised via fund-raises, they are not financially healthy.
Could they be one day? Maybe.
[–] _heimdall 4 days ago
Yes they do need to grow margins to cover expenses, eventually when Amazon had to turn a profit.
My point was only that the numbers we do know clearly show a drop in growth rate of revenue, I can't judge numbers that aren't publicly known.