Anthropic IPO Panic, A Spy At OpenAI?, The Great Food Slop Debate

Alex Kantrowitz (0:00)

Anthropic is growing fast, but its growth rate is slowing, leading some investors to panic ahead of its IPO. Was there a spy at OpenAI, and it's time to end food slop, or is it? That's coming up on a Big Technology Podcast Friday edition right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put agentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at VOYA Financial to go inside a large scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today.

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Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool headed and nuanced fashion. We have a great show for you today. We have the latest Anthropic numbers ahead of its IPO. Finally, some 2026 revenue. It looks good, but is it good enough to avoid a full blown panic as the market digests the numbers? We're also going to talk about the reported incident of corporate espionage within OpenAI, what it means and whether there's more afoot. And then finally, Ranjan and I are going to debate whether all these AI generated images on restaurant menus and signage are good for humanity or the end of us.

And that will be fun and wait for that at the end. So joining us as always on Fridays is Ranjan Roy of Margins. Ranjan, it's good to see you, welcome back.

Ranjan Roy (2:04)

Good to see you. I believe AI generated food slop images represent the American dream better than anything else, but we'll get to that.

Alex Kantrowitz (2:11)

Oh my God, please, please, please do not, do not seriously back this belief. I can't stand the AI signs, but okay, we'll hold the debate till the end because right now, finally, what you've been asking for, the Anthropic 2026 numbers are here. They're very impressive, but I think expectations have been set so high that no matter what Anthropic showed potentially, there would have been some panic and we are indeed seeing some panic today. So let me read the story. This is from the information. Anthropic's rapid but slowing growth could weigh on its IPO valuation. Anthropic reported rapid but slowing revenue growth in a meeting with potential investors. The company said revenue hit $16.8 billion in the third quarter. That was a jump of about 45% from the second quarter. The figure was more than 3.6 times the company's revenue for all of 2025 However, and now there's a big but here, but it also represents a slower growth rate than Anthropic's second quarter when fever demand for its Claude Code product drove up revenue by more than 140% from the first three months of the year, right? So here's the interesting thing, right? So Anthropic's revenue, we know it was in the $4 billion range for all of 2025

It grew 140% from the first quarter of the second quarter this year, but then only grew 45% from the second quarter to the third quarter, reaching $16.8 billion. That's not enough for a lot of people. And we're already starting to see some of these tweets come through saying it's over, some worry that Anthropic's growth rate is slowing, which of course, like law of large numbers, it was eventually going to.

And the party seems like it might be not over, but more muted than initially anticipated. People are saying that this shouldn't be a $2 trillion IPO. It's probably going to be closer to $1.5 trillion. And of course there could be a ripple effect to all of those that were expecting Anthropic to be bigger. So what's your read on the numbers, Ranjan?

Ranjan Roy (4:15)

My read on the numbers is release the damn S1. This is getting so frustrating again.

And we're going to get into some confusion around Reuter's report. But overall, it's just a Rorschach test right now. I mean, everything we see, it's clear. I mean, 45% off of that base is incredible growth. But when you start to extrapolate it out, they would have to re-accelerate growth to get to that 100 billion number, even an 80 billion number. Basically, if they take, I think it was like, it was around a 7% quarter on quarter, sorry, month on month growth. If you extrapolate that out, they get to about 75 billion in revenue. Again, any of these numbers on their own in any other context would be remarkable, fantastic, unprecedented.