Every bubble goes through this phase just before it pops. Pre-implosion Twitter had tons of folks doing useless “research” projects, WeWork had folks studying furniture design’s impact on wellbeing, and so on.
When you’re more worried about this sort of stuff vs generating profit then the history books strongly indicate that’s usually not a good omen of what’s coming next.
Technology != company. The tech is here to stay but we still don’t have an example of a company that has figured out how to make a profit off of it. That will come, and it might be OpenAI or Anthropic that does it … but it might not.
Well we don't know what the margins on AI models will be. If the proprietary models hit a ceiling pretty soon, then open source models and harnesses could close the gap, at that point it becomes much more of a lower margin business. And OpenAI and Anthropic will no longer be able to dominate as much as they are today. That would 100% affect their projected multi trillion valuations negatively.
This seems like a reasonable response to demonstrable fact (e.g. <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/15/anthropic-revenue-jumps-to-over-11point5-billion-in-q2-report.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/15/anthropic-revenue-jumps-to-o...) so I don't see why it's getting downvoted.
Open models are 12 months behind frontier models. What companies spent $11 billion on last quarter they will be able to get at cost in a year. Meanwhile Anthropic is losing $40+ billion a year. I just don’t see how this ends well for them.
Per my link, 11.5B is enormously up since the same time last year; per other easily found sources, they also claim an operating profit for that quarter, and are now claiming at least 65B ARR with a projection of 100B by end of year. They may have lost 40B last year but that does not mean they "are losing 40+B a year".
Companies are paying Anthropic for more than just the model. Most of them would probably have no idea what to do with Claude without the harness, and Claude has the advantage of being specifically trained against that harness, whereas even the best open models have to figure things out for themselves.
Aside from which, many corporations can be relied on to chase that which is "industry standard" and/or "state of the art" rather than switch to an "open" (= no customer support) alternative that's merely "good enough" according to a rational analysis based in what they were doing a year ago. Even if it costs them far more. (We can see this from the fact that "tokenmaxxing" was a thing for a while.)
cmiles8 · · focus · HN ↗
When you’re more worried about this sort of stuff vs generating profit then the history books strongly indicate that’s usually not a good omen of what’s coming next.
bonoboTP · · focus · HN ↗
hyperbovine · · focus · HN ↗
zarzavat · · focus · HN ↗
gallerdude · · focus · HN ↗
Apocryphon · · focus · HN ↗
tzone · · focus · HN ↗
zahlman · · focus · HN ↗
hyperbovine · · focus · HN ↗
zahlman · · focus · HN ↗
Companies are paying Anthropic for more than just the model. Most of them would probably have no idea what to do with Claude without the harness, and Claude has the advantage of being specifically trained against that harness, whereas even the best open models have to figure things out for themselves.
Aside from which, many corporations can be relied on to chase that which is "industry standard" and/or "state of the art" rather than switch to an "open" (= no customer support) alternative that's merely "good enough" according to a rational analysis based in what they were doing a year ago. Even if it costs them far more. (We can see this from the fact that "tokenmaxxing" was a thing for a while.)