Theoretically Apple can spend just as much. What are the outcomes though? All those giants have their own business that are established and profitable.

It’s the new kids in the block that will make the difference.

You know those lists on twitter about how many companies US has in top 10 and are presented as a win? Those are actually lists of capital concentrations blocking innovation. It looks like US is winning but for some reason life is better in EU and innovation is faster in China.

It’s companies like OpenAI Anthropic that will move US ahead. Even if some core innovation or and capital comes from the establishment.

I'm trying paid tier Gemini and it doesn't allow to keep have personal chat history when you disable training on your data, on reload of the page your chat is gone. Even free tier of ChatGPT allows disabling training on your data while allowing to keep such basic functionality.

Some technical advancements are not worth it if you do not respect your users.

Google fucks up 90% of their products, why do you think Gemini is in the 10%?

Well there's a good reason that OpenAI partnered up with Microsoft. The calculation is that the established big techs - Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta are all going to be significantly impacted by AI so it's not unreasonable to look at Anthropic at 10% of their market cap as a reasonable value. Would it be worth Apple to bring Anthropic in house? They failed to deliver AI themselves, they know the risks of being dependent on Google. If AI goes far enough it may totally remove Apple's differentiation.

Some of the Big Techs are building their own in house stuff (Meta, Google), but it wouldn't be crazy to see acquisitions by the others, especially if the market cools slightly. And then there's the possibility that these companies mature their revenue streams enough to start actually really throwing off money and paying off the investment.

Slight counter point - claude code is basically the only developer tool that ever been happy to pay money for. Getting the entire software industry to give you $200/mo/person is quite the market.

how does any startup beat an incumbent?

Google's only focus isn't on Gemini. Anthropic is do-or-die

I’d guess they want to outlast OpenAI and then get bought by Apple or Amazon.

Google has invested in Anthropic. I don't trust that Google will compete on fair grounds with Anthropic on coding. Their common enemy is OpenAI.

Given the amount money that they are spending for vastly subpar products maybe they need to quadruple their capex

It’s a major issue in VC. Main Street doesn’t get access until it’s time to offload. Prevents capital recycling for early stage as well.

Next year 140 billion the following year 1.4 trillion, 14 trillion the year after that?

What are the benefits ?

If you give me $1T to spend, I, too, can probably make $14B (this is a metaphor)

I would hold off congratulating them until they’re actually in the black. They are still burning billions a year lol the revenue is impressive but their expenses are still solidly north of it.

Yeah, up from $1B a year ago.

Two years ago, I considered investing in Anthropic when they had a valuation of around $18B and messed up by chickening out (it was available on some of the private investor platforms). Up 20x since then ...

It was always obvious that Anthropic's focus on business/API usage had potential to scale faster than OpenAI's focus on ChatGPT, but the real kicker has been Claude Code (released a year ago).

It'd be interesting to know how Anthropic's revenue splits between Claude Code, or coding in general, other API usage, and chat (which I assume is small).

What was their original mission?

My sense is that startup mission statements are ~meaningless. Builders try to build great things that lots of other people will find valuable.

considering their series F was only ~5 months ago this doesn't seem too far-fetched!

G is tame. Wait until you hear of Databricks’ Series K…

https://www.thesaasnews.com/news/databricks-raises-1b-series...

Emojis would be far more appropriate for AI startups

They could stop at F and treat it as hexadecimal by adding digits: Series 4F, etc

The timing of the Claude Code guerilla marketing campaign that seems to have started around new years is now making much more sense.

You're attributing way too much intent to what is the viewpoint of some random analyst at Goldman Sachs (who doesn't even control any purse strings). A year ago there was another big hullabaloo when a GS team wrote a long post about how AI companies would never make enough revenue.

Matt Levine has put this forward in his newsletter - if you're moderately influential you can go on TV and tell people that "X industry will be dead in 10 years" because of AI and then profit from the inevitable stock dip.

Because we live in the worst possible timeline the end result for AI companies does seem to be "too big to fail", where these massive investments will get foisted on working class people via a bailout or an IPO and index inclusion.

We already have: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/feb/02/elon-musk-sp...

> What do you call a herd of 1000 unicorns together?

As millipede, clearly therefore millicorn.

Funny I consider this valuation modest considering what the max extent of the investment thesis is here.

SaaS and legal market caps have already contracted a multiple of the combined OpenAI + Anthropic valuations just based on the _threat_ of what they may be able to accomplish.

Then they will fall back on the selling their other real competitive products - hardware accelerators, phones and PCs, cloud storage and cloud compute, enterprise software, databases, operating systems, office and media suits... Oh wait...

They’ll become commodity AI compute providers while training and selling premium foundation models.

These companies are spending billions on custom datasets for a gazillion of valuable tasks and are clamping down on exfil for distillation. It's not guaranteed open source models will continue to keep pace.

What do you value a company at that has gotten to $14b in revenue in 3 years and has 60%+ margin on inference? Just out of curiosity.

check your credit card statement Dad

I think the idea is to reduce labor costs by replacing the human workers.

Microsoft is deeply entwined in OpenAI and has obvious reasons to dogfood, yet their people are using Anthropic solutions.

Valuation behemoth OpenAI has been forced by the market to use Anthropic standards a couple times, having no comparable solutions of their own.

… I can see it.

It's Web 2.0 all over again. No moat, winner-take-all (economies-of-scale/network-effect). Just have to out-spend everyone else, and then figure out whether it was worth it all after you win.

Having a cutting edge model that requires tens of billions of dollars to train + a massive concentration of talent and experience + brand + one of, if not the best, coding experiences in Claude Code

These are all moats.

Ain't that for the entire ai field.

FOMO, pretty much

They have a moat on hype.

At least from the software engineer pleb perspective, their moat is that their tools seem to work well more often than not. I wasn't comfortable with the idea of using GitHub CoPilot as our GenAI solution at work, and apparently that was a widespread feeling, because we switched to Claude Code, and it's been a relatively smooth transition from manual coding to GenAI agentic loops.

As the clear category leader in HN posting, I agree

It's marketing copy--I wouldn't expect them to say otherwise.

It is quite obviously Microsoft. They use the same (in my dictionary illegal) tactic they did with Teams.

I mean, I do think it is true, I’m not sure if this is like fastest toddler in the preschool or whatever.

Microsoft engineers use their offerings over OpenAI - their partner.

That isn’t nothing.