Based on the recent accelerating growth in Anthropic’s revenue and my expectations about AI progress in the immediate future I think there is a 35% chance that Anthropic is the most valuable company in the world by May 30th, 2027. This is operationalized through public market cap if there has been an IPO, and secondary valuation if they have not.
Ways I can imagine this not happening:
1) OpenAI manages to monetize its consumer base and it becomes the most valuable company in the world
2) Greater demand for chips makes it impossible to catch Nvidia or another chip maker, like Google.
3) “Surely the growth in revenue must stop soon, this has always been an s curve” arguments turn out to be true in the short run.
4) Perhaps there is some random bottleneck I haven’t considered, though I’d actually need someone to point me to the specific bottleneck to put much weight on this.
5) Perhaps Anthropic’s ARR numbers are juiced in some particular way that makes the reported numbers deceptive.
6) Perhaps if revenue continues to grow this fast, it will lead to such radical changes that it will create political will for a slowdown.
A way (but not the exclusive way) I can imagine this happening: The 10x a year growth rate turns out to just continue, as it has for the last 3 years, or perhaps we even get something faster (and Anthropic’s revenue growth on a yearly basis has been ~85x the past 4 months). 10x a year growth rate gets us to a revenue of about 440 billion a year from now. A possible IPO allows liquid markets to price this very quickly, and a revenue like this seems to imply a valuation over 10 trillion to me. This seems like it would be more than any other company.
The mechanism for the 10x a year growth rate continuing would be the mass automation of white collar jobs, which seems like it would be possible in another 3 doublings of AI progress. Assuming a 4 month doubling time in capability growth, as operationalized through a metric like time horizon, this seems plausible, but not probable. If the doubling time turns out to be faster, this seems like it is more likely than not to me.
Meta-reasons for how aggressive this forecast is: Every revenue prediction I’ve ever made for Anthropic has been directionally too low, and this seems to require a huge update on my part. Nearly every forecast, including AI-2027 and most forecasts of top forecasters, have also been too slow on this topic. AI-2027, for example, projected the leading AI company to reach Anthropic’s current ARR of 44 billion sometime between September 2026 and January 2027.
With these two things in mind, it seems that humans in general have underestimated how much AI capabilities of about this level would affect revenue and valuations, even those with short timelines, creating even stronger reasons for the directional update. I am very interested in feedback on this, because if this forecast is true it seems to imply an extremely radical situation. Even of my reasons this could not happen, 1, 2 and 6 imply a radical situation.
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.