How Anthropic Hit a $65 Billion Run Rate

0:28John Daly here. You're listening to a podcast right now. Driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're into podcasts, chances are you have something to say too. With RSS.com, starting your own is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and hundreds more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads like this. even with just 10 listeners a month. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign. Start free at rss.com. Big news out of Anthropic. Apparently, they have told their investors that they hit a$65 billion revenue run rate in July, which is, of course, really big news.

1:16They are prepping for an IPO, confidential IPO, at$965 billion. So that's really exciting news. Today, we're going to talk about Anthropic, all they have going on. But before we do that, Jane, why don't you tell us about our school community? Yeah. So every week, Jamie and I record a bonus episode that we post over on our school community. And that is one where we break down more of our personal side hustles, how much money we're making for them, how much money we're spending on them, what we're doing to accomplish that. And we usually have this, we've actually had the school community where it's, we've had at different prices.

1:53It's been about$50. It's actually been a hundred dollars a month before, depending on what, um, depending on what, like the promos or discounts, it is currently free to join guys and it will not be free to join forever. So if you're interested in joining, go, uh, join the AI hustle school community. It's linked in the description. Uh, you get access to, um, five videos for free. You can pay for the whole catalog. It's like$19 a month if you want to get the whole catalog, but there's over 800 members sharing what they're working on. It's an awesome community. And we would love to have you be part of it.

2:24So go check it out. It is linked in the description. Okay, this is wild what's going on with Anthropik right now. Like you're mentioning, Jamie, they're getting ready to do their IPO. Like you said, OpenAI's IPO right now is going to be a$965 billion valuation. But Anthropik's is potentially$2 trillion. That is crazy. Anthropic is going for more than double the valuation of OpenAI. And the reason is because OpenAI recently came out and said, and I quote, in the most elusive way possible, they're on track to hit a$40 billion run rate. On track? Like, when will that track run? Like, how much money are you guys making today?

3:03Anyways, so I absolutely hate it when people are, yeah, when they're so elusive and OpenAI is so elusive. And the reason they're elusive is because Anthropic is absolutely spanking them. Like I remember the moment that Anthropic surpassed OpenAI for revenue. And it was just kind of this crazy moment because this was like totally the number two company. And now they're at a$65 billion run rate. And so when people are like, how could they claim to be worth$2 trillion? Well, last month they were at$40 billion and now they're at$65 billion. Or I guess a few months ago, they were at$40 billion. Now they're 65 billion.

3:38If you could just add like tens of billions of dollars every single, every single few months or every single month, like that's how you, that's how you're valued at that. Now, the crazy thing that a lot of people are talking about here is that SpaceX recently set the all time record for the biggest IPO at$1.77 trillion. And Anthropic is potentially coming out ahead and going to beat them in that, which is pretty, pretty crazy. And there's actually like a poly market bet right now, which is like who will have the biggest IPO of 2026 and SpaceX, you know, has kind of been the highest. And all of a sudden SpaceX is dipping and Anthropic is overtaking them in or, you know, getting close to overtaking them in that poly market bet, which of course, it's the betting markets.

4:23It's not like the truth, but it's a pretty good indicator of where investors are putting their money. So it looks like Anthropic is going to become one of the biggest ones. And what's crazy is their Q2 revenue was$11.5 billion. That's a 14X jump year over year since last year. That's crazy. 14X? That's insane. I know. I think what I would attribute a lot of their success to is timing the market because I feel like they surpassed OpenAI in some of their models right at the time when a lot of businesses started looking to adopt AI. So in that curve of like businesses trying to adopt AI, Anthropic kind of pulled ahead as far as their models and usefulness.

5:13And that's when they captured all those users. So, you know, because now, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, Jane, but a few weeks ago you were back on the Codex OpenAI train, right? Are you using that still more now so here's this here's the deal here's the deal jamie i have i paid 200 a month for codex and i actually love it and it's awesome it has like a couple bugs in it and i've had these same bugs with um clod in the past but like it just like it wasn't connecting the first thing is like it won't connect to my meta ads mcp which is like a big project i'm focusing on right now because I'm spending thousands of dollars.

5:54I'm getting close to spending$10 ,000 on my like MetaAds account in the last few weeks for AIbox, my company. And I'm seeing amazing returns and results, but like I need an MCP to go in and like understand what's happening inside the account. I hate doing that. So anyways, because of that, I paid 20 bucks to get access to Claude again because Claude was working. And I was like, I'll just use it to check that. And then I had something where like I ran out of tokens for OpenAI and I needed to do a project. So then I was like, I'll just get the$100 Claude account. So then now I have$100 Claude account and a$200 OpenAI account.

6:29I use both of them. I max out all their tokens. It's annoying. Basically, like there's a couple of small things where like, and where OpenAI wasn't, isn't for me. It wasn't properly connecting to my browser to like look at what's on my browser, which is a huge percentage of everything I do. And it's like, restart your computer, but I just have so many projects running that I didn't want to restart my computer. So in the absence of that, I just have been giving Claude all those projects and then it feels like I'm just moving everything back over to Claude. Now, is Claude perfect? No, Claude is still very frustrating.

6:58One of the most frustrating things that I went semi sort of viral on LinkedIn talking about was that when I upgraded from my$20 to my$100 Claude account, because it was like, you ran out of like tokens, like upgrade to keep getting access when I was on the$20 and I was like, okay, fine. Cause I didn't want to wait two hours to check on a project I was working on. So I upgraded. um i upgraded to a hundred dollars and claude was still was like okay you still have to wait an hour and i was like so mad so i like closed claude or restarted claude everyone told me afterwards i should have logged out and logged back in or restarted my computer um but anyways i didn't do that and it was just a very annoying glitch of claude where like even after i upgraded from 20 to 100 it still didn't let me back in after it had blocked me out so none of these companies are perfect they all have little bugs um and they're all kind of working them out but like i they're basically the same and in the next couple months i'm sure any little bugs one has the other won't but yeah i'm still back and forth and anyways so anyways that's why it's funny to me when they're like oh we're up from 40 to 6 or you know 47 to like 65 billion it's like well i like tried to cancel my clods and i'm already i'm i came crawling back giving them another hundred dollars a month so i'm part of the problem growing uh growing their bottom line i know my so my mind is just blown.

8:13I never imagined that I would pay a hundred dollars a month for, for something like a tech service, like for as long as I can remember the, the going rate for something was, you know, even like the Adobe suite seemed super expensive, you know, and it was like 20 bucks a month. Yeah. Somehow Anthropic convinces all to pay a hundred bucks a month for their, their services. Although I will say I haven't been rate limited in a while, but I'm probably not using it as much as you. Um, so I don't know if they're working on fixing those, those issues or, or what, but, um, I'm still, I'm still in the cloud.

8:50I haven't tried. You almost convinced me to try codex and switch over, but I never did. So I guess I'm going. Well, it actually has like way more features. I think it's, they did a lot of work to try to make it better. So I was pretty happy about it, but, uh, yeah, there's a couple of little small things. Um, it's more like cloud code. And for some reason, the computer uses and the MCPs are like not as smooth, which I don't know why OpenAI hasn't got that right. The other thing that I will say that is a big deal when we're talking about this is that there's another competitor coming to the market.

9:21And that is that XAI or SpaceX, I don't even know what to call it anymore, right? It was XAI's Grok, now SpaceX bought them and then they bought Cursor and they roll it in. Anyways, they have their own Grok bot is what it's called. And it will be like Claude Cowork or ChatGPT work where it's controlling your computer and actually able to do all this stuff. So I'm really excited about that to have more competitors in this space. I felt like, and they've apparently built a really incredible model with the latest Grok model because they have Cursor, the biggest coding tool in the world that everyone runs their code through, able to use data to train and make a really impressive coding model.

10:04So I like, I honestly think, and I was like the biggest Grok fan a long time ago, and I kind of got off Grok because of like a bunch of dumb stuff that I felt like the company was doing. But I think it's going to be a serious competitor, especially for coders, just because of the scale of like the assets of all of the training compute that SpaceX has, it being able to buy a cursor, which is like the greatest asset of all time. I honestly, good for SpaceX to be able to buy that um and i mean it cost them 60 billion dollars but still that's a pretty sweet move that's you know that's like one year of revenue for anthropics so big whoop if they get a legendary company like that so i think we'll hopefully have three three competitors and i'm hoping google and maybe microsoft might jump in and try to compete in that space um google it seems like a no-brainer microsoft seems maybe but i think we should have like i would love to have at least four competitors for claude co-work because it's an awesome tool but it's expensive and it'd be nice to kind of move around.

11:00And also my last complaint, and then I'll let you close this out, Jamie, is when it comes to Claude, the only other downside is it really does lecture me so much all the time. And I know they're like trying to make it like aligned and safe and have guardrails, but I am not a person that likes to be lectured or told what to do. And it, like, sometimes it's like, you can't do that because of blah, blah, blah, blah reasons. And I'm gonna be like, okay, I sort of see what you're saying. Like that can happen, even if whatever. There's also a big percentage of the time where it's like, it keeps bringing up to me, like I'm working on a big project and it keeps bringing up to me like why X, Y, and Z is super unethical, what I'm trying to do.

11:41And I'm like, you're reading the data completely wrong. But like every time it sends that to me, I don't want to reply like, no, no, no, you're not reading the data. It's actually this cell. That's where we're getting the data from. Like, I don't care about what it thinks is unethical. I just want it to get the code project done. Do you know what I'm saying? so I'm like I don't want to have to like feel like I'm being babysat by you even if even if it's wrong I don't want to have to respond to that just get my job done because I'm trying to get this job done and it's not like I'm making nuclear bombs or like trying to release a bioweapon I just need to like get this this dashboard built and put my analytics in there correctly and it's like misreading it and thinks I'm trying to like fake my analytics or something I'm like oh my gosh anyway so rant over plot can be a little a lot overbearing when it comes to uh it what it does yeah for sure but yeah either way i think it's really interesting that they've surpassed open ai especially because open ai now has ads so you think and people spend a lot of money from my experience on open ai ads they give it a shot and it was very expensive uh you'd think they would be able to keep up at least, but kind of crazy that Anthropic has done this without advertising.

12:54So anyways, if you guys would like to check out our school community, we'd love to have you be a member. We go through exactly how we're using these tools, why we're spending$100 a month or$200 a month on them, and how you can also make money and grow your business using AI. So check out AI Hustle. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you next time. Hi, Uncle Lazer here. America's built on fast cars, fast food, and even faster women. Moto Casino's built in America. You know what they're fast at? Fast cash, rise, redemption. You see, only Moto is U.S. owned and operated. Moto. It's American-made.

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