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Why Alphabet is the Winner from Anthropic’s Incredible Growth
08 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Anthropic is one of the fastest growing companies in history, but there may be another winner investors can buy right now. Motley Fool Money starts now. Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I am Travis Hoy. I'm joined today by Rachel Warren and Lou Whiteman.
Chapter 2: What factors contributed to Anthropic's rapid revenue growth?
And guys, we got to start with Anthropic. The talk of the week has been their announcement that they have gone from a $9 billion annualized revenue rate. Maybe not the best measure for revenue because it's not actually, but it kind of gives you an idea how fast they're growing. So $9 billion at the end of 2025, $30 billion at the end of the first quarter.
Rachel, this is just absolutely insane growth from a company at that scale.
Yeah, that $30 billion run rate is actually just quite mind-blowing. I mean, you put that in perspective, Anthropic essentially tripled its business in just 90 days. I mean, we usually celebrate when a company doubles in a year doing it in a single quarter. I think it shows that at least for now, what many have framed as AI hype, if you will, it's turning into this massive enterprise land grab.
You know, this isn't just about startup growth, this is, I think, very much a fundamental shift in how the enterprise world is adopting AI across industries. And I think something that Anthropic has really tried to put out there is very much this kind of safety and reliability angle with businesses using Claude, whether it's you know, healthcare giants, tech companies or otherwise.
And I think it's so doing, they've, you know, unlocked the corporate vault, so to speak. I think we're seeing businesses are finally moving past the experimental phase and they're putting massive budgets behind these models. And that's creating exponential tailwinds for Anthropic.
I feel like, In talking about this, we risk parroting or extending the AI hype. It's really hard to take a big-picture look at this. I'd note that searches for Claude tripled over the last 90 days, according to Google Trends. That lines up with the revenue. Obviously, I think those are related. We know this. Claude is having its moment. Claude is all we've heard about for the last 90 days or so.
That's great. And if it's sustainable, it should mean that it's a good business, probably a better business than the other AI giant that wants to go public. But I think to assume that this continues is lowercase foolish. Look, there are natural limits here to what people can spend.
Travis, I think I said it to you, but there was a viral LinkedIn post last week of a CEO bragging about their four-person company spending $125,000 a month on Anthropic right now. I'm just going to go out on a limb. I don't know anything about that business, but you cannot continue to triple that indefinitely. There's just not enough revenue there. This is great.
I think all of this does, though, on the revenue side is tell us what we already knew, is that Claude is the only thing we've heard about over the last 90 days or so.
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Chapter 3: How is Alphabet benefiting from Anthropic's success?
But this company, maybe with United as its only rival, is just so well-run and sees things so well. And this quarter, this is why they are the best.
I agree. I think it's probably one of the most well-run, if not the most well-run of the airline companies. A few things stuck out to me in addition to what Lou said. They were unprofitable under GAAP, but they reported an adjusted profit that grew by more than 40%.
Another interesting piece of this, revenue from premium seats, corporate travel, loyalty programs makes up more than 60% of the top line at this point. Premium revenue was up 14% in the quarter. Main cabin revenue actually increased for the first time since late 2024.
So that was another element that I think kind of surprised me, even though the most significant growth that we're seeing is in those premium areas. As Lou noted, they're doing a good job of cleaning up the balance sheet. CEO Ed Bastian said that, Delta is going to meaningfully reduce their capacity growth plans in the near term as fuel costs soar.
It isn't clear, though, if or when customers will pull back. Certainly, of course, in these results we're seeing now, there is a very, very robust tailwind carrying them into this next quarter of growth. So overall, I think a good start to the reports from the airlines for this earnings season.
We keep looking for canaries in the coal mine that the economy is getting weaker, and they just never seem to show up. We'll keep looking. But with the market where it is, we're bouncing back today, early on Wednesday, maybe one of the best days that we've ever had in the stock market, at least on certain metrics.
But the economic weakness that I think would show up in a lot of those airlines first has not shown up yet. We'll see what happens, especially with oil prices in the future and how consumers are feeling.
As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows The Motley Fool's editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content provided for informational purposes only.
To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. For Lou Whiteman, Rachel Warren, and Dan Boyd of Buy in the Glass, I'm Travis Hoyum. Thanks for listening to Motley Fool Money. We'll see you here tomorrow.
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