The Dark Horse of AI Labs

How Anthropic's Missionary Zeal Is Fueling Its Commercial Success.

- 

Perhaps it is inevitable that Anthropic, an artificial intelligence (AI) lab founded by do-gooders, attracts snark in Silicon Valley. The company, which puts its safety mission above making money, has an in-house philosopher and a chatbot with the Gallic-sounding name of Claude. Even so, the profile of some of those who have recently attacked Anthropic is striking.

One is Mr Jensen Huang, boss of Nvidia, the most valuable company on earth. After Dr Dario Amodei, Anthropic's chief executive, raised the spectre of big job losses as a result of advances in AI, Mr Huang bluntly retorted: "I pretty much disagree with almost everything he says."

Another is Mr David Sacks, a venture capitalist (VC) who is one of US President Donald Trump's closest tech advisers. In a recent podcast, he and his co-hosts accused Anthropic of being part of a "doomer industrial complex".

Dr Amodei gives short shrift to such criticisms. In an interview on the eve of the release of Mr Trump's AI Action Plan, he laments that the political winds have shifted against safety. Yet even as he cuts a lonely figure in Washington, Anthropic is quietly becoming a powerhouse in business-to-business (B2B) AI. Dr Amodei can barely suppress his excitement. After his firm's annualised recurring revenue grew roughly tenfold over the course of 2024, to US$1 billion (S$1.28 billion), it is now "substantially beyond" US$4 billion, putting Anthropic possibly "on pace for another 10x" growth in 2025. He doesn't want to be held to that prediction, but he is over the moon: "I don't think there's a precedent for this in the history of capitalism."