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Big Technology Podcast · 3 min · Oct 26, 2026
Investors underestimated Anthropic’s business-first growth
Dan Primack says OpenAI investors once assumed consumer ownership mattered more than Anthropic’s B2B path. Anthropic’s revenue grew from $41 million to $16.3 billion in three years, exposing that misread.
Dan Primack is a Business editor at Axios and author of the Pro Rata newsletter.
Alex Kantrowitz, Host · Founder, Big Technology
Former BuzzFeed News senior tech reporter and author of Always Day One.
About this segment
Dan Primack says OpenAI investors once assumed consumer ownership mattered more than Anthropic’s B2B path. Anthropic’s revenue grew from $41 million to $16.3 billion in three years, exposing that misread.
From “Emergency Pod: Anthropic's S-1 IPO Filing — With Dan Primack”, Oct 26, 2026. Watch the full episode
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
“they knew anthropic but they didn't see it coming”
Takeaways
- OpenAI backers once thought consumer ownership mattered most.
- Anthropic’s revenue reached $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026.
- Revenue per employee reached $6.6 million.
In this episode
Full episode- 7:24Investors may buy the AI basket despite weak financial signals3:09
- 19:16Compute access is Anthropic’s practical risk, while safety risks are existentialPro pick 3:02
- 14:04Anthropic’s B2B bet helped diversify its customer base2:30
- 16:34Compute efficiency is central to Anthropic’s path to profit2:51
10:34Investors underestimated Anthropic’s business-first growth2:36
- 3:16Anthropic’s raise taps different pools of capital2:18Up next
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 10:39
What would you say the story is? I think the story is that this is going, that Anthropic or OpenAI, pick one of these companies, is kind of going to become, you know, we talk about foundation models. But I think the story is this is going to be the foundation for business and society going forward. Truly, truly foundational, much like it's complicated because people always talk about the Internet and there's these, you know, the dot com boom and the question, are these really kind of the Selex of the time?
- 11:08
You know, the companies that were really putting fiber in the ground, which didn't work out very well for most people. It was stuff built on top of them. That's possible. But I think a difference here is that these companies themselves are actually building a lot of applications, whereas the Selex of the day and the fiber layers didn't build anything on top of it. They were just actually the utility.
- 11:28
In this case, Anthropic is trying to be both. And so is OpenAI. Right. I mean, the revenue growth itself is extraordinary. I mean, they went from $41 million in revenue three years ago to $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026. Correct. Yeah. that doesn't happen it doesn't happen and what's i think almost more remarkable is that it's only probably about maybe 18 months ago uh that when i would speak to investors in open ai they felt that this race the frontier model race was already determined they they did not see they knew anthropic but they didn't see it coming because when you would talk to open ai investors about this and i'd say yeah but doesn't anthropic you know it's going to be kind of going after more of a b2b marketplace you guys are more known you know for chat gpt and you know my mom using it or
- 12:13
and me using it as a consumer. The answer would be, yeah, but owning the consumer is what matters. They would point to Google from years ago. Owning the consumer is what matters. The B2B place is gonna be small and they misread that extraordinarily. Yeah, 6.6 million in revenue per employee. How does that rank with what you typically see technology companies IPO-ing with? I haven't done the math on it, except it's more.
- 12:38
And by exponent, I mean, 6.6 million per employee, that's an insane number. It's just an insane number. It's even insane for Anthropic, right? I think last year, didn't they say it was like the same number was 1.4? I'm saying this now off the top of my head, but it was something like that. It was in the ones. It's a crazy number. I mean, think about that. 1.4 million in September 2025. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's a ridiculous number.
- 13:01
And it just shows how fast they are scaling on the top line. Yeah.