# Enterprise coding is driving Anthropic's faster growth Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/enterprise-coding-is-driving-anthropics-faster-growth/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy. - Speaker: [David Sacks](https://realalpha.app/people/david-sacks/) (Host) · Co-founder & partner, Craft Ventures · PayPal's first COO, founded Yammer; White House AI & crypto czar 2025–26. - Host: [Chamath Palihapitiya](https://realalpha.app/people/chamath-palihapitiya/) · Founder & CEO, Social Capital · Led Facebook's growth team; his firm backed Slack and AI chipmaker Groq. - Host: [Jason Calacanis](https://realalpha.app/people/jason-calacanis/) · Founder & CEO, LAUNCH · Early Uber angel; sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL; hosts This Week in Startups. - Host: [David Friedberg](https://realalpha.app/people/david-friedberg/) · CEO, Ohalo · Founded The Climate Corporation, sold to Monsanto for about $1.1B in 2013. - Show: All-In - Episode: [OpenAI's Identity Crisis, Datacenter Wars, Market Up on Iran News, Mamdani's First Tax, Swalwell Out](https://realalpha.app/v/SFdqX7IY7RY/), Apr 17, 2026 - Moment: 22:09 to 27:04 of the episode (5 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/enterprise-coding-is-driving-anthropics-faster-growth/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/SFdqX7IY7RY/?t=1329 ## Quote > “The OpenAI growth rate has been around 3 to 4x a year. The Anthropic growth rate has been around **10x a year**.” > — [David Sacks](https://realalpha.app/people/david-sacks/) at [22:56](https://realalpha.app/v/SFdqX7IY7RY/?t=1376) · All-In ## Takeaways 1. Sacks estimates OpenAI was growing 3–4x annually. 2. He estimates Anthropic was growing about 10x annually. 3. Businesses pay more as they use more coding tokens. ## About this segment David Sacks argues that metered enterprise coding revenue scales faster than consumer subscriptions. He points to a stark growth-rate gap between Anthropic and OpenAI. From “OpenAI's Identity Crisis, Datacenter Wars, Market Up on Iran News, Mamdani's First Tax, Swalwell Out”, Apr 17, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/SFdqX7IY7RY/) ## Transcript Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there. [22:14](https://realalpha.app/v/SFdqX7IY7RY/?t=1334) But look, this other part of the criticism of OpenAI that they shouldn't do enterprise is totally misguided. One of the reasons why they should have been more focused is to do more enterprise and get enterprise more correct. Now, why do I say that? To Travis's point about growth rates, it's true that OpenAI and Anthropic, as of the beginning of Q2, so let's say two weeks ago, they were both around $30 billion of revenue. [22:41](https://realalpha.app/v/SFdqX7IY7RY/?t=1361) And that memo from that OpenAI employee was right, that if you compare them on an apples-to-apples basis, that Anthropic is about 20% less because they are including revenue made by their channel partners. But that doesn't matter. What matters is the growth rate, again, to Travis's point. And let me just put some numbers around this. The OpenAI growth rate has been around 3 to 4x a year. The Anthropic growth rate has been around 10x a year. [23:08](https://realalpha.app/v/SFdqX7IY7RY/?t=1388) So they went from, let's call it one to 10 billion of ARR last year. And by the end of Q1 this year, they were already at 30 billion of, again, that's called their revenue. And they're on their way, you know, like Brad Gerstner was saying on our podcast, I think in the last couple of weeks, they're going to end this year at 80 to 100 billion, at least on the current trajectory. And so you can plot their revenue on a logarithmic graph. [23:35](https://realalpha.app/v/SFdqX7IY7RY/?t=1415) I mean, again, no one's ever seen anything like before, where every unit on the y-axis is 10x, and it's a straight line. Now, it's crazy, right? So if it's taking Anthropic, let's say, one year to 10x, and it's taking OpenAI two years to achieve a 10x, then it's obvious which one's going to win. Now, what is the reason for this? is because Anthropic was very focused on enterprise, specifically coding. And what you're seeing is that businesses are willing to pay for coding, code tokens, on a metered basis, let's call it like electricity. The more they use, the more they're willing to pay, and their usage just continues to scale and scale. [24:17](https://realalpha.app/v/SFdqX7IY7RY/?t=1457) Consumer is completely different. I mean, consumer is a thing that OpenAI prioritized. Consumers have a lower willingness to pay. Maybe only 3% or 4% of them are willing to convert to premium in the first place. And what they want is a $20 a month, all you can eat subscription. So the revenue simply doesn't scale the same way that enterprise does. And so if you want to tap into the scalable revenue source in the market right now, you have to go after enterprise. [24:40](https://realalpha.app/v/SFdqX7IY7RY/?t=1480) So, you know, again, where I would agree with the criticism of OpenAI is maybe they should have been more focused, but they need to be more focused specifically to pursue coding and enterprise. And if they don't catch up soon, to Travis's point, then you could see Anthropic taking a lead here that, let's say over the next one or two years, could be insurmountable. Just by the way, let me just say one thing is, even though Anthropic's revenue has followed this exponential graph very predictably, it can't do that forever, right? Let's say it does get to $100 billion this year. Can it really get to a trillion dollars in revenue the year after that? [25:20](https://realalpha.app/v/SFdqX7IY7RY/?t=1520) seems hard to believe, right? And the reason is because as you hit new levels of scale, you encounter new problems. I mean, you're simply going to run out of compute or electricity, data centers, infrastructure. There are physical limits or there's limits in the physical world that you're going to hit. And there's already some evidence that Anthropic is hitting some of those limits. Users were complaining, for example, that Claude was thinking less. Did you guys see this, that, you know, a typical Claude prompt, they seem to have cut down on the thinking time by about two thirds. Now, I saw someone tweeting today that they just released Opus 4.7, replacing Opus 4.6, and the thinking is back. But, you know, maybe they're charging more for that, hard to say. But they're going to hit some sort of physical limits. And I do wonder if over [26:06](https://realalpha.app/v/SFdqX7IY7RY/?t=1566) the next year, Anthropic will reconsider whether its support for all this, like, Doomer, NIMBYism was the right call because it kind of made sense for them from a business standpoint when their competitors were building data centers and they were just getting compute from the hyperscalers. But now that they're, I think, going to have to move into the game of building their own data centers, they might regret salting the earth for data centers all over the country. And I wonder if that'll be the natural limit of their growth is they'll be wasted on their own petard of doomer nimbyism. And they're also using the coding platform to build anthropic itself better. So that in and of itself is a reason to nail coding, you get the double whammy, you can make a better product, and you can get paid for it. Yes and no. Hold on. Because if you look on Twitter, [26:57](https://realalpha.app/v/SFdqX7IY7RY/?t=1617) people are panning cloud desktop. And what they said is this is all a bunch of vibe coded slop.