Recently, sources familiar with the matter reported that the latest valuation of artificial intelligence company Anthropic has surged to $100 billion, nearly doubling from $58 billion four months ago. This surprising growth mainly stems from financial data recently disclosed by Anthropic to certain investors, particularly its annualized revenue which quadrupled in the first half of 2023, exceeding $4 billion.
To support this momentum, Anthropic completed a $3.5 billion equity financing round in March and plans to raise a total of $5.5 billion this year. Despite the significant investment challenges facing the entire AI industry, as a leading company in the field, Anthropic has demonstrated strong commercialization capabilities, attracting the attention of many investors, especially in high-profit areas such as AI programming.
From a profitability perspective, Anthropic's financial situation is relatively complex. The company earns a gross margin of about 60% by directly selling its AI models and the Claude chatbot, and it is expected to increase to 70% in the future. However, through Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, the gross margin for this part of the business is negative 30%. As of the end of 2023, 70% of Anthropic's revenue came from direct sales, with an overall gross margin between 50% and 55%, showing no significant improvement.
As one of the successful applications of large language models, automated programming tasks have brought substantial profits to Anthropic. Since the full launch of its coding assistant Claude Code in May, its downloads have increased sixfold weekly, reaching 3 million now, making it an important source of revenue for the company, contributing over $2 billion in annualized revenue. In addition, Anthropic's rapid growth has also indirectly driven the development of other startups, such as competitor Cursor, whose annual revenue has grown tenfold since last November.
In terms of cash consumption, Anthropic and OpenAI face similar challenges. It is expected that Anthropic will consume $3 billion in cash this year, while OpenAI will consume $6.8 billion. Although OpenAI's revenue is several times that of Anthropic, its cash consumption is relatively low. Overall, both companies have shown remarkable revenue growth, making investors optimistic about the future, expecting both to exceed their targets set at the beginning of the year.
