RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Conversations between companies and investors are largely a practice in the art of painting the rosiest picture possible. Anthropic is apparently planning on taking the practice to its logical conclusion. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, the frontier AI lab is intending to tell investors that its potential revenue could top $30 trillion, which is the kind of number where you basically are daring people to call you full of shit.
To be fair, Anthropic has set that figure as the total addressable market, which is basically every available dollar within a given category. So hitting that revenue figure would require the company to achieve a 100% monopoly. But it is by far the most aggressively optimistic picture of the AI space that anyone has offered—and that's a market that includes perennial bullshit artists like Elon Musk.
Speaking of, Musk's SpaceX previously provided the biggest claim to a market when it went public earlier this year, launching with the largest IPO in history (though shares haven't exactly held their value since then). At the time, Musk's company offered investors an official claim to a $28.5 trillion market. Musk, of course, made an unofficial claim that SpaceX would eventually be worth "more than the rest of Earth if we accomplish our goals," which probably says more about how much he values the Earth than anything about his hyperbole about his own prospects at success.
One-upping SpaceX's figure is a bold strategy to begin with, but the unbridled audacity deserves context beyond that. The 191 technology companies that are currently contained within the S&P 1500 generated a collective $2.4 trillion in revenue last year, meaning Anthropic believes it could 12x that all by itself. Another useful bit of context: the annualized gross domestic product of the United States as a whole is $32.4 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve of St. Louis . So Anthropic, showing modesty, doesn't believe it'll fully eclipse the revenue of the richest country in the history of the world.
As mentioned, Anthropic's projection assumes it captures 100% of the market, but it's a long way off from that. Reuters reported earlier this week that the company is currently projecting revenue of between $190 billion to $200 billion by 2028, significantly higher than its current $47 billion run rate. Even at that aggressive growth figure, Anthropic would be sitting at 0.67% of the supposed $30 trillion market controlled by the time it likely goes public, so it has just a little bit more work to do to capture the rest of that pie.
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