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In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · 2 min · Oct 21, 2026

Anthropic surpassed Google's revenue-growth record

Eric Schmidt says Anthropic's revenue grew at more than twice the pace of Google's record when he was CEO. He also describes model cycles that can expire faster than they take to build.

Eric Schmidt

Eric Schmidt is a former CEO of Google and technology executive.

Scaled Google as CEO through 2011, now runs rocket maker Relativity Space and co-founded Schmidt Sciences.

About this segment

Eric Schmidt says Anthropic's revenue grew at more than twice the pace of Google's record when he was CEO. He also describes model cycles that can expire faster than they take to build.

From “Eric Schmidt: Are We Ready for Superintelligence? | Podcast | In Good Company”, Oct 21, 2026. Watch the full episode

“they smashed it more than twice the speed as we did right”
Eric Schmidtat 3:51 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen3:51

Takeaways

  1. Schmidt cites revenue growth as evidence of real demand.
  2. He says models take months to build and can age quickly.
  3. Competition between leading labs moves on a months-long cycle.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 11:22AI agents could flatten business and speed up work6:14
  2. 17:41Europe needs to make it easier to build AI companies3:16
  3. 35:56AI could remove the coordination tax in large companies2:22
  4. 24:03Free Chinese models could win users despite trailing by months3:14

  5. 3:23Anthropic surpassed Google's revenue-growth record2:07

  6. 8:40AI can use known knowledge, but novel discovery remains uncertain2:41Up next
  7. 21:06A bot incident showed why AI containment matters2:59
  8. 29:34Online recommendation loops can boost false claims2:30

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 3:25

    this was off the chart bigger than everything else you've seen? I'm always not first. I wait to see where the slope is. And we get all sorts of data in the things that I do to see that this is not a bubble. Everyone says, oh, it's a bubble. They're wasting their money. If you look at Anthropics revenue growth, when I was CEO at Google, we set the revenue growth record they smashed it more than twice the speed as we did right that's growth. It's not fake. It's real money with real customers who are paying for something useful in their eyes. One way to understand tech is that time compresses every cycle. 30 years ago, I had lots and lots of time to build products, to think about it, to give talks, to make mistakes, and so forth. Now there's no time. The models, for example, take roughly six months to build,

  2. 4:28

    two months or so to actually test, and they're released and they're antiquated within five months. The models themselves cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make. Some estimates are much higher. I'm using conservative numbers. Can you imagine being in a business where you get six months to build something and then it expires in less time than you built it because the next thing is coming along and if you look today the the hyper competition is at the moment and this moves around between anthropic and open ai because of deep reasoning um i was with my friends at google and they said just wait when gemini 4 comes out it's gonna beat them all right and i bet you that if we go to meta they'll say just wait till the next one and the timing is measured in months not years i don't know i mean the next the next cycle will drive people insane because it'll be days

  3. 5:24

    it's fun to be alive it's a great can i just say one thing yeah for your audience