ANTHROPIC IS STILL HUNG UP ON 'AI SAFETY.' TURNS OUT, BIG BUSINESS LOVES THAT.

UNDER DANIELA AND DARIO AMODEI, THE WONKY STARTUP HAS SHRUGGED OFF ITS "DOOMER” REPUTATION. NOW IT'S THE GO-TO AI TOOL FOR THOUSANDS OF COMPANIES. HOW LONG CAN IT STAY AHEAD OF ITS BIGGER, FREE-SPENDING RIVALS?

- BY JEREMY KAHN

DARIO AMODEI IS, in his telling, the accidental CEO of an accidental business—one that just happens to be among the fastest-growing on the planet.

“When we first started Anthropic, we didn’t have any idea about how we would make money, or when, or under what conditions,” he says.

Anthropic is the San Francisco-based AI company that Amodei cofounded and leads. And it hasn’t taken long for it to start pulling in lots of money, under lots of conditions. The startup has emerged as one of the leading rivals to OpenAI and Google in the race to build evermore-capable artificial intelligence. And while Anthropic and its Claude family of AI models don’t have quite the same brand recognition as crosstown rival OpenAI and its ChatGPT products, over the past year Claude has quietly emerged as the model that businesses seem to like best.

Anthropic, currently valued at $183 billion, has by some metrics pulled ahead of its larger rivals, OpenAI and Google, in enterprise usage. The company is on track to hit an annualized run rate of close to $10 billion by year-end—more than 10 times what it generated in 2024. It also told investors in August that it could bring in as much as $26 billion in 2026, and a staggering $70 billion in 2028.

Even more remarkably, Anthropic is generating such growth without spending nearly as much as some rivals—at a time when massive capital expenditures across the industry are stoking anxiety about an AI bubble. (OpenAI alone has signed AI infrastructure deals worth more than $1 trillion.) That’s in part because Anthropic says it has found ways to train and run its AI models more efficiently. To be sure, Anthropic is nowhere near profitable today: It was pacing to end 2025 having consumed $2.8 billion more cash than it took in, according to recent news accounts citing forecasts provided to investors. But the company is also on track to break even in 2028, according to those projections—two years ahead of OpenAI.