Anthropic’s IPO Leak, OpenAI’s Dots vs. Meta’s Muse, Visual Turing Test

Alex Kantrowitz (0:00)

Anthropix IPO numbers leak, are they good enough to save the economy? OpenAI has a new, always on agent called Dots, and have we passed the visual Turing test? 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 coolheaded and nuanced format. We have a great show for you today. The long-awaited Anthropic pre-IPO numbers are out courtesy of a leaked report in Reuters. We're going to go over the numbers and talk about whether they're good enough to keep this economy running. We also have a new always on agent from OpenAI called Dots. I've tried it. I'm going to give my reflections and why I'm sending it a ton of work already. And then finally, we're going to talk about Tavus and the visual Turing test. Yes, there are some bots now that can completely fool you into thinking they're human on a video call. Joining us as always on Fridays to do it is Ranjan Roy of Margins. Ranjan, great to see you.

Ranjan Roy (1:59)

Good to see you. We're getting so much closer to the real S1. And we're getting these tidbits and we're going to dig into it. But I mean, did you see they're going to, I think they announced Investor Day is supposed to be October 14th, and that means we're on track for a pre-Thanksgiving Anthropic IPO.

Alex Kantrowitz (2:18)

Exactly. Yeah, it's coming in November. I think there's no doubt it comes this November. And as you mentioned, we got a leak. So Reuters did scoop basically the entire S1. They didn't print it out for us, but they gave us all the numbers that Anthropic is taking to Wall Street. And we finally have some like binding numbers, not ARR.

And I'm actually curious how you read them, because there are some good numbers in there, and there are some numbers in there that make you just kind of shake your head and ask, how is this going to work? So if you will, let me give you a couple of them to start off with. So the good news is the company's revenue is, if you're Anthropic, the good news is the company's revenue is growing exponentially, right? 400 million in 2024, 4.6 billion total in 2025 Now at the end of the year, they said they had a 10 billion ARR, but like if you have a 1 billion ARR in January and 10 in December, 4.6 is kind of where you would imagine things net out. The crazy number to me is on that 4.6 billion in revenue that they reported, they said they told investors they plan to spend 518 billion over the next decade on computing and infrastructure. And of that, 80% of that spend, 80% of the spend is binding. So you're looking at a company that just basically made in the most recent year that it can report $4 billion that has committed $400 billion and has no way of getting out of it. These are the numbers. Your reaction?

Ranjan Roy (3:56)

My reaction is, I was a little disappointed not in the numbers, which we will get into, is that the leak doesn't have the H1 2026, the first half of the year financials. When they're, they're definitely going to need to be filing and actually publicly stating some amount of 2026 financials and revenue numbers and lost numbers, which I'm sure they'll likely be. But so, so we have a good look at what Anthropic looked like at the end of 2025

And again, 4.6 billion in revenue. I think what was the net loss was around, for reference, there's this $42 billion number that's being thrown around as a net loss. And I say this, someone who probably is going to be skeptical or dig into a lot of their numbers, but it's not actually $42 billion, $34 billion of it is, it's a weird accounting treatment issue related to the company actually growing in value a lot. But the net loss is still around $8 billion. They're still losing around $2 to actually make every single dollar that they're making. So to me, in 2025, they were losing a lot of money.