Anthropic's 'growth slowdown' overblown? ARR projections show steady climbs for both labs
FinanceYF5 · x · 2026-10-16
The author argues the market over-read Anthropic's slowdown, sharing month-by-month ARR projections through Sep 2026: Anthropic climbing from $9B in Dec to $74B, OpenAI from $21B to $50B. Despite August vacation season — when token consumption should dip — both companies still posted solid month-over-month growth.
Key points:
- OpenAI's September Astra launch pulled some user budgets to try the new model;
- Tech Fund, after completing a large coding project with Astra, found it smart but Opus 5.5 more efficient and collaborative; a new Fable version is coming;
- Long term, high-difficulty tasks will drive most industry ARR, where Anthropic stays strong; open models will dominate standardized tasks with more tokens but lower revenue and margins.
Related event: Anthropic ARR Growth Slows, But Analysts Say Reaction Is Overblown(3 posts)→
More from Venture
- Three CoreWeave co-founders have sold $3.3B in shares since IPO amid credit worries — SumitGup · 2026-10-16
- Robotics data startups compared: Scale AI tops $1B revenue as 9 LLM vs robotics data suppliers benchmarked — FinanceYF5 · 2026-10-16
- Only 4.5% of US consumers pay for AI, but the top 1% of spenders drive 19.5% of revenue — dumpshoot · 2026-10-16
- Anthropic ARR growth cools to 6.5% MoM, but OpenAI plus Anthropic revenue still climbing steadily — FinanceYF5 · 2026-10-16
- Hot take: products built on LLM APIs aren't AI-native, just reselling someone else's loop — fkasummer · 2026-10-16
- Marc Andreessen quips Anthropic secondaries are on a 'Tesla Roadster pipeline' — beffjezos · 2026-10-16