Take a look at this chart:
And this LinkedIn post:
These numbers are nuts.
Last year, the conversations online were about how amazing Lovable was for being the fastest-growing company in history from zero to $100M ARR (8 months).
But Anthropic increased their run rate from $9 billion to $30 billion in the span of 4 MONTHS. These numbers are on another level. Especially when the CEO and one of the founders of the company, Dario Amodei, has said the founding team didn’t necessarily want to create their own company.
Starting as a spinoff from OpenAI in 2021, Anthropic started as a research lab focusing on safety and niche products for a niche demographic.
When OpenAI launched their first public version of ChatGPT on November 20th, 2022, it took Anthropic almost 4 months to catch up and launch their first version of Claude (in March 2023).
Anthropic was late to the show, but they’ve made up incredible ground against OpenAI in both usage and revenue.
Today, you can’t turn anywhere without someone on LinkedIn sharing Claude Code advice. Even Mark Zuckerberg is using the product: Sources: Mark Zuckerberg is back to writing code after a two-decade hiatus, submitting three diffs to Meta’s monorepo, and is a heavy user of Claude Code CLI.
And big AI conferences, like HumanX, are buzzing about Anthropic’s products. From a recent CNBC article:
“It has become a religion, that’s the level of that mania,” Jain said in an interview. “Everybody, if you go and ask them today, ‘Hey, if I gave you one AI tool, what tool would you want?’ The answer would be Claude.”
And from a blog post by legendary tech blogger Steve Yegge:
As you’ve probably noticed, something is happening over at Anthropic. They are a spaceship that is beginning to take off.
With Claude Code the top choice of technical users, Claude.ai exploding in popularity, and the launch and immediate hockey stick growth of Cowork…
Anthropic is no longer the hipster, underground alternative. They’re leading frontier AI.
From a recent article in TIME:
Already, its $380 billion valuation eclipses those of Goldman Sachs, McDonalds, and Coca-Cola. Its revenues are a rocket ship. Claude is considered a world-class model, with products like Code and Cowork upending what it means to be a programmer. Its tools are so good that each new release causes stock-market shocks, as investors grasp the likelihood the advances will upend entire categories, from law to software development. Over the past few months, it emerged as the company most poised to disrupt the future of work.
And from the article Everyone Is Talking About AI. The People Actually Winning Are Using Claude:
From $1B in annualized revenue at the end of 2024 to $14B by February 2026. That’s a 14x jump in 14 months.
These aren’t normal numbers, and this isn’t a normal company.
Since I started using Claude Code heavily in July 2025, I’ve followed Anthropic’s journey closely.
I’ve spend thousands of hours using their products both professionally and personally, reading their white papers, optimizing my setup, browsing niche subreddits, reading tell-all articles, and listening to interviews with team members.
And today, I’m sharing what’s sticking out to me — about where they’re going, how they think about business, and my observations on why they’ve grown.
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