This seems like a reasonable forecast, and if you could buy Anthropic stock, I’d buy a lot of it.
But, I think there are some additional reasons for skepticism:
1) At some point, open weights models (or perhaps cheaper closed ones) will eat a lot of Anthropic’s business for use cases that don’t require being at the frontier. We’re only just reaching the point where this matters—Anthropic models started having real economic value only very recently and so being on the frontier has meant a lot. But, once the open weights models catch up to what, say, Opus 4.6 could do, then how much does that peel off? This is a worse problem for Anthropic if the frontier is kinda lumpy (and it might well be) where instead of delivering continuous economic value improvements you have to cross particular thresholds to open the next set of tasks ahead while open weights eat you from behind.
2) Is their current lead likely to be durable? Best argument in favor is that Claude itself is a big speedup but the counterargument is that this is a relatively young, relatively small company without any obvious moat and with financial resources that are, for the moment, way behind those of, say, Google. So it can’t really be that hard for Google to do what has to be done to eat their lunch. Likewise, there’s an argument that moving to the next level financially requires a kind of expertise in working with big corporate clients that they lack as compared to Google/Microsoft.
3) Subjectively, it seems like Claude excels at coding but ChatGPT is often better at factual stuff. It may well turn out that OpenAI has the edge when it comes to non-coding knowledge work.
4) Similar to your #2 above, the AI boom so far has generated massive market cap gains, which have mostly been captured by the semiconductor stack. So, to suppose that Anthropic will surpass Nvidia, Broadcom, and TSMC, you have to suppose that for some reason the current trends for value accruing to semiconductors vs. model builders will flip. Is something different now than over the last few years to explain why that would happen?
Re: your 4, it seems to me that value has been accruing to model builders over semiconductor companies at a faster rate in the status quo. Anthropic’s valuation has growth by ~50x in the last 2 years whereas, for example, Nvidia’s has only grown by ~2.5x in this time. The chip makers just had a much larger preexisting business. So I don’t see a trend reversal being needed.
This seems like a reasonable forecast, and if you could buy Anthropic stock, I’d buy a lot of it.
But, I think there are some additional reasons for skepticism:
1) At some point, open weights models (or perhaps cheaper closed ones) will eat a lot of Anthropic’s business for use cases that don’t require being at the frontier. We’re only just reaching the point where this matters—Anthropic models started having real economic value only very recently and so being on the frontier has meant a lot. But, once the open weights models catch up to what, say, Opus 4.6 could do, then how much does that peel off? This is a worse problem for Anthropic if the frontier is kinda lumpy (and it might well be) where instead of delivering continuous economic value improvements you have to cross particular thresholds to open the next set of tasks ahead while open weights eat you from behind.
2) Is their current lead likely to be durable? Best argument in favor is that Claude itself is a big speedup but the counterargument is that this is a relatively young, relatively small company without any obvious moat and with financial resources that are, for the moment, way behind those of, say, Google. So it can’t really be that hard for Google to do what has to be done to eat their lunch. Likewise, there’s an argument that moving to the next level financially requires a kind of expertise in working with big corporate clients that they lack as compared to Google/Microsoft.
3) Subjectively, it seems like Claude excels at coding but ChatGPT is often better at factual stuff. It may well turn out that OpenAI has the edge when it comes to non-coding knowledge work.
4) Similar to your #2 above, the AI boom so far has generated massive market cap gains, which have mostly been captured by the semiconductor stack. So, to suppose that Anthropic will surpass Nvidia, Broadcom, and TSMC, you have to suppose that for some reason the current trends for value accruing to semiconductors vs. model builders will flip. Is something different now than over the last few years to explain why that would happen?
Re: your 4, it seems to me that value has been accruing to model builders over semiconductor companies at a faster rate in the status quo. Anthropic’s valuation has growth by ~50x in the last 2 years whereas, for example, Nvidia’s has only grown by ~2.5x in this time. The chip makers just had a much larger preexisting business. So I don’t see a trend reversal being needed.