Toby Howell

A megacorn?

A trillicorn?

Left in the dust is OpenAI, who last raised at a paltry $852 billion valuation, as Anthropic's popular coding tool, CloudCode, has spread like wildfire and pushed its competitor off the top of the AI startup heap.

Anthropic said its ARR crossed $47 billion this month.

That is up from a reported $4 billion in July of last year.

There's been some chatter about how companies like Uber or Microsoft are pulling back on their AI spending as it balloons in costs and hasn't led to sufficient ROI.

And yet, anthropic investors seem undaunted and almost turned it into our first trillion-dollar AI startup outside of some weird Elon company combining stuff.

This valuation is crazy, too, because I mentioned a Series H round.

You never get to a Series H round.

That is a very rarefied AR, not necessarily good or bad.

It's just very few companies make it that deep in private rounds.

Facebook, Slack, Lyft, and Discord are a few that you may have heard of.

Databricks recently raised

a series I, J, and K, but they only hit a $134 billion valuation.

So Anthropic is an order of magnitude larger than them.

And I also talked about the unique moment we're in right now in AI, where a lot of companies are going, is this worth it?

They're laying off workers in order to afford their AI spend.

So some questions are raising around if this is going to be

A profitable endeavor going forward.

Axios recently told this anecdote about a client who spent half a billion dollars in one month on clod code usage after failing to cap that.