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Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation

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Re: Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation

#221

Post by sequin »

jrjeksjd8d wrote: post #119
rhrtah wrote: post #110

Goldman Sachs recently stoked fear about software stocks due to claimed AI competition. What if their strategy is this: slowly drive down software stocks, keep talking about AI, buy the downward market. Then cash in on the IPOs of OpenAI and Anthropic. Then let OpenAI and Anthropic implode. Goldman Sachs had no problems underwriting webvan at the end of 1999, which then imploded in 2000. Anyway, I just valued my dog…

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 bail…

I doubt talking heads on the TV can move markets.

Re: Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation

#222

Post by browningstreet »

Yizahi wrote: post #114
H8crilA wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has barely released a successful product in 20 years.

Depend on the definition of the "product". For example some banal cloud storage in which everyone competes. And it's an "old" product, despite being invisibly improved behind the scenes, just like at any other provider. Google has pretty competitive storage AND they are fully abusing Android integration for AND they have pretty good bundling of that storage with other products, including, you've guessed it - LLM Gemi…

Google Drive is easily the worst of the desktop cloud storage options. It’s okay for Google Docs but not other files if that’s what you’re talking about..

Re: Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation

#223

Post by lossolo »

WarmWash wrote: post #200
lossolo wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Get bankrolled by the state at the state's discretion until they get what they want, even if they need to burn $1B to get $1M of value" If that's how it worked, they wouldn't lead in anything, they'd be bankrupt already. They burn state money like VCs burn cash. DeepSeek, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Huawei, etc., disprove your point.

Look into how their 5 year plans have lead to capital investment with almost zero feedback. A heavily bureaucratic system of bureaucrats incentivized to spend massively to boost their own appearance, and cover up losses/inefficiencies. Ghost cities, empty high speed rail lines, solar cells being mass produced at a loss. All these things also produced end products the state wanted, no doubt. But the capital allocation…

Is there a lot of wasted capital? Sure but a lot of it still produces outcomes.

> A heavily bureaucratic system of bureaucrats incentivized to spend massively to boost their own appearance, and cover up losses/inefficiencies.

In China, if you want to move up politically, you generally need to show results, meaning the province or area you govern is expected to deliver measurable performance (even if politics and connections still matter too). In that sense, you could argue it's more performance driven in some respects than the US.

EVs and solar were clear priorities, and China has been very successful at scaling both and driving costs down. Domestic competition has been so intense (especially in EVs) that margins have gotten extremely thin, and officials have recently signaled they want to curb "irrational" price wars.

> Ghost cities

Sure, some exist, but many of the developments that were circulated online years ago have filled in over time. That said, there's no question a lot of projects stalled or collapsed during the property downturn, especially after China Evergrande and other developers ran into trouble.

> empty high speed rail lines,

I can't speak to every route, but overall the high speed rail network is heavily used. When I traveled in China, it was excellent and extremely extensive. Some lines and stations likely see weaker demand than others, but the idea that it's broadly "empty" doesn't match reality.

> solar cells being mass produced at a loss

With overcapacity and price wars, many firms have faced serious margin pressure and losses though that doesn't mean every producer is losing money on every panel.

In the end, the real question is whether the capital allocation is efficient enough for citizens to benefit and for the country to remain competitive. Empirically, the answer looks closer to yes in industry and infrastructure, while real estate has been a major exception, with real costs and inefficiencies.

Re: Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation

#224

Post by pragmatic »

twobitshifter wrote: post #195
reenorap wrote: post #51

How is Anthropic, OpenAI and xAi going to compete against the likes of Google that can spend $200 billion a year? It’s an impossible war and all these investors are throwing their money into a bottomless insatiable pit of money. Until the funding stops for one reason or another and then everyone loses all their money at once like a star that collapses into a black hole singularity in a femtosecond.

As someone who thought Google+ doomed facebook, because of Gmail accounts and everyone with Google as their homepage already, I learned not to overestimate Google’s abilities.

How in the world would you have thought that? Genuinely curious.

It was obviously DOA and waaaayyy outside G'scompetence.

Re: Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation

#225

Post by simianwords »

verdverm wrote: post #163
verdverm wrote: post #2

it's crazy that Google is spending something like 4x this in a year just for capex wonder how much of that $30B will make it their way and pay that down

has me wondering if Anthropic is one of those confidential TPU buyers

likely because Google has stake in Anthropic

Re: Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation

#226

Post by pragmatic »

XorNot wrote: post #169
stouset wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google built ten different chat products, how did that go?

Does it matter? Microsoft won by default with Teams because it actually turns out no one cares about chat or even has a choice in it: employees use whatever the company picks.

It's bundled with office and no serious business can live without excel.

Re: Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation

#227

Post by vessenes »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #129
Hamuko wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is their overall margin also about 60% too? Or something saner like 30%?

Their overall margin is negative.

No, it’s not. This is a dangerous perspective, usually held by engineers who think that accounting doesn’t matter and don’t understand it.

You MUST accrue the lifetime value of the assets against the capital expense (R&D in this case) to determine the answer to this question.

The company (until this announcement) had raised $17B and has a $14B revenue rate with 60% operating margin.

It is only negative on margin if you assume the prior 14B (e.g. Claude 4.6 plus whatever’s unreleased) will have no value in 24 months. In that case, well, they probably wasted money training.

If you think their growth rate will continue, then you must only believe the models have a useful 9 months or so life before they are break even.

Anthropic is, according to Dario, profitable on every model <<—- they have trained if you consider them individually. You would do best to think “will this pattern continue?”

Re: Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation

#228

Post by lostmsu »

rvnx wrote: post #213
lostmsu wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same can be said about Claude (no or tiny Opus on Pro) vs GPT-5.2 high (5.3-codex if you like terminal bench hacking).

You mean GPT-5.3-Codex is a much better value than Claude Opus for programming ? If yes then I'm very interested as I am using Claude there

I guess it depends on your spending. GPT-5.2 and -5.3-Codex are certainly much cheaper: you get much more from the same $20 sub. When I was using Claude as primary I would daily hit limits and have to wait vs on GPT with more usage it only happened to me once in a few months when I was vibecoding non-stop for a week or two to port my personal Windows tools to Linux with multiple other projects being worked on in parallel.

Anecdotally GPT was also smarter than Claude which prompted my move from Claude in the first place: Gemini and Claude back in October failed to get their own harness PID.

Outside of anecdata I rely on https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/capabilities/coding for now.

Re: Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation

#229

Post by pragmatic »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #168
saagarjha wrote: post #17

Kind of amusing that there is basically no mention of their original mission at all here.

Anthropic has one of the best moats of any business that's been created in the last 50 years. Numerous companies have tried and failed competing with SoTA foundational models. If Anthropic had no moat, Apple and Meta wouldn't be paying them billions for coding asistance. Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Nvidia would all have SoTA competitors to Claude. They all tried and have not produced a competitor. Instead you have three…

They're the least incompetent in the space.

Big companies are handcuffed by Innovators Dilemna etc.

Re: Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation

#230

Post by maxerickson »

kccqzy wrote: post #165
criddell wrote: post #134

I wonder how good it is for companies to be allowed to grow so big and still be private? Would it makes sense to require any company with more than a billion dollar valuation to be subject to all the same SEC requirements that public companies are? Could companies be blocked from raising money once the reach a crazy valuation like $1 billion?

That doesn’t make sense at all. The raison d’être of SEC is to protect regular mom-and-pop investors. A private company just doesn’t allow anyone to invest in them. Why should SEC rules apply? On what legal basis can you force a private company to divulge its financial details? Would you be happy if you, as an individual, have to divulge your account statements if your own net wealth reaches one million?

It's a corporation, it exists at society's leisure.

It might be necessary to create a legal basis, but it's just a matter of doing it. If the owners don't like it they can dissolve it.

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