The compute moat is getting absolutely insane. We're basically at the point where you need a small country's GDP just to stay in the game for one more generation of models.
What gets me is that this isn't even a software moat anymore - it's literally just whoever can get their hands on enough GPUs and power infrastructure. TSMC and the power companies are the real kingmakers here. You can have all the talent in the world but if you can't get 100k H100s and a dedicated power plant, you're out.
Wonder how much of this $13B is just prepaying for compute vs actual opex. If it's mostly compute, we're watching something weird happen - like the privatization of Manhattan Project-scale infrastructure. Except instead of enriching uranium we're computing gradient descents lol
The wildest part is we might look back at this as cheap. GPT-4 training was what, $100M? GPT-5/Opus-4 class probably $1B+? At this rate GPT-7 will need its own sovereign wealth fund
This round started at $5bn target and it ends at $13bn. When this sort of thing happens it's normally because the company wants to 1) hit the "hot" market, and 2) has uncertainty about their ability to raise revenues at higher valuations in the future.
Whatever it is, the signal it's sending of Anthropic insiders is negative for AI investors.
Other comments having read a few hundred comments here:
- there is so much confusion, uncertainty, and fanciful thinking that it reminds me of the other bubbles that existed when people had to stretch their imaginations to justify valuations
- there is increasing spend on training models, and decreasing improvements in new models. This does not bode well
- wealth is an extremely difficult thing to define. It's defined vaguely through things like cooperation and trade. Ultimately these llms actually do need to create "wealth" to justify the massive investments made. If they don't do this fast this house of cards is going to fall, fast.
- having worked in finance and spoken to finance types for a long time: they are not geniuses. They are far from it. Most people went into finance because of an interest in money. Just because these people have $13bn of other people's money at their disposal doesn't mean they are any smarter than people orders of magnitude poorer. Don't assume they know what they are doing.
Impressive round but it seems unlikely this game can go on much longer before something implodes. Given the amount of cash you need to set of fire to stay relevant it’s becoming nearly impossible for all but a few players to stay competitive, but those players have yet to demonstrate a viable business model.
With all these models converging, the big players aren’t demonstrating a real technical innovation moat. Everyone knows how to build these models now, it just takes a ton of cash to do it.
This whole thing is turning into an expensive race to the bottom. Cool tech, but bad business. A lot
of VC folks gonna lose their shirt in this space.
So many negative comments here! The fact that one of the top players in a new market segment with significant growth potential can raise $13B at a 20x revenue valuation is not the bubble indicator you think it is.
It's at least possible that the investment pays off. These investors almost certainly aren't insane or stupid.
We may still be in a bubble, but before you declare money doesn't mean anything any more and start buying put options I'd probably look for more compelling evidence than this.
Their projections for ARR at the end of this year at a high of $9B[1] at the end of this year. And reported gross margins of 60% (-30% with cloud providers partnerships). All things considered, if this pans out, it's a 20x multiple. High yes, but not that crazy. Specially considering their growth rate and that too at a decent margin at gm level.
[1]: It was $3B at the end of May (so likely $250M in May alone), and $5B at end of july (so $400M that month).
Throwing money and compute at AI strikes me as a very short-term solution. In the end, the human brain does not run off a nuclear power plant, not even when we are learning.
I expect the next breakthroughs to be all about efficiency. Granted, that could be tomorrow, or in 5 years, and the AI companies have to stay all at in the meantime.
There's a big issue with a lot of thinking about these valuations, which is that LLM inference does not need the 5-nines of uptime guarantees that cloud datacenters provide. You are going to see small business investors around the world pursue the following model:
- Buy an old warehouse and a bunch of GPUs
- Hire your local tech dude to set up the machines and install some open-source LLMs
- Connect your machines to a routing service that matches customers who want LLM inference with providers
If the service goes down for a day, the owner just loses a day's worth of income, nobody else cares (it's not like customers are going to be screaming at you to find their data). This kind of passive, turn-key business is a dream for many investors. Comparable passive investments like car washes, real estate, laundromats, self-storage, etc are messier.
Hopefully this'll give them another 3 months of runway, so they can go back to letting me use Claude Sonnet for 5 hours out of the 5-hour limit, rather than the 2.5 hours I'm getting now.
($100-plan, no agents, no mcp, one session at a time)
Very interesting to see firms who already bet big on OpenAI (like Altimeter) on the list for this round. Anyone else remember when OpenAI told investors they couldn’t invest in competitors [1]?
I don't get the sky high valuation of LLM companies. I mean I get that these guys need a lot of money for compute to train the next generation of models. But Distillation does make it easy for other providers to replicate gains made by these providers at a much lower cost.
On a long enough timeframe, the open source models will catch up to the proprietary models and inference providers will beat these proprietary companies on price.
Every round Anthropic raises twists the knife deeper in SBF. If only he could have survived the downturn his Antropic investment alone probably could have papered over the other loses.
My contrarian take on the astronomical costs need to scale LLM infrastructure is that since it does cost so much, innovation at the grid and power plant / renewables will also see massive gains and ultimately save our planet.
AI investment is headed toward 2% of the US GDP, getting close to the Apollo program and 10 times the manhattan project. Almost 15% of the US stock market is tied up in these investments so most of us have skin in this game whether we like it or not, for better or worse.
i guess emissions, climate concerns , economics are all just out the window here?
My feeble uncle isn't allowed to buy a single lightbulb in his state yet , but burning terawatts for useless porn generators is where we are investing our engineering efforts.
As part of a longer conversation, i asked chatgpt when GPT5-level capabilities will be cheap enough to include in gift cards, throwaway plastic toys, etc. Answer was 2030-35. https://chatgpt.com/share/68b8ac92-ad28-8008-b2f4-5b1d777558... ... conversation went on to envision a future where trillions of discarded full-gpt5 chips litter landfills and fungi learn to power them up and incorporate their knowledge into their biome, but you can just ignore that part
Very happy for them - curious if the funding will help with the current capacity issues.
5 minutes into my first opus prompt on Claude Code on an empty repo, I've already been warned by Claude Code that I'm about to hit my opus limit despite not using it in 12 days.
Interesting that investors pay so many billions for a product that just iterates until something, somehow compiles but emits subtle garbage.
Intellectual engagement goes down, users get dumber and only look at quantity. China is taking first steps to continue its excellence. In the New York Post of all places:
Maybe these labs should consider funding specific models, and funneling returns back to investors from profits made with those models. Like the film industry.
Valuations are high, but it's also the first time in history when developers are spending $200 per month on tools and feeling they are getting great value out of them.
I think one key question is can Anthropic replicate this on some other segment. Like with people working with financials.
Ironic timing considering their service has never performed so poorly as it is currently. One look at their subreddit paints a bleak picture at the moment, and is a far cry from a time when they were the AI darling.
Everyone is so pessimistic about bubble bursting and money are simply catches on fire in this AI race…
However, I remembered when Youtube was young. It was burning money every month on bandwidth.
After selling out to Google, it took another decade to turned profit. But it did. And it achieved its end game. As the winner, it took all of the video hosting market. And Google reaped the entirety of that win.
This AI race is playing out the same way. The winner has the ability to disrupt several FAANGs and FAANG neighbors (eg. Adobe). And that’s 1-2 trillion dollar market, combined.
It’s about time the western world finally changes from a five to four-day work week!
That’s just about the most tangible benefit I see this AI breakthrough delivering. What an asset to have too, socially and civilly, especially when compared to the west’s primary adversary: the CCCP and its communist message of ‘equality’ for the people when they’re still working six days a week!
The greatest failure of American capitalism today is that meteoric companies take decades to trade on public markets instead of years. Only the already wealthy and connected are allowed to invest in these kinds of opportunities. In the 80s and 90s Anthropic would have been trading on NYSE already. Zoomers have it rough ...
Why are they bothering with billions of dollars when crypto coins already delivered, right on schedule, the new foundation of global currency? Why aren't these previous investors pouring all of their BTC into Anthropic as fast as possible? Isn't $183,000,000,000 a massive signal that this next leap for Silicon Valley will be as solid as their previous revolution?
> Headline: OpenAI raises 400 Trillion, proclaims dominion over the delta quadrant
> Top comment: This just proves that it's a bubble. No AI company has been profitable, we're in the era of diminishing returns. I don't know one real use case for AI
It's hilarious how routinely bearish this site is about AI. I guess it makes sense given how much AI devalues siloed tech expertise.
That's now between an entire Instagram and WhatsApp acquisition cost.
It's hard to escape the conclusion this is dumb money jumping on a bandwagon. To justify the expected returns here requires someone to make a transformer like leap again, and that doesn't take spending huge amounts in one place, but funding a lot more speculative thinkers.
FTX creditors should be seeing red. the trustee sold Anthropic out at the bottom. Same for crypto. Hindsight is 20-20, but imagine had CZ not made those tweets of divesting from the FTT token. FTX could have possibly weathered the final 3 months of the BTC bear market and then reaped the post-2023 AI and crypto bull market. Sam would have gone from pauper in jail to brilliant investor in Anthropic, mogul, and so on.
Anthropic raises $13B Series F
(anthropic.com)590 points by meetpateltech 2 September 2025 | 635 comments
Comments
What gets me is that this isn't even a software moat anymore - it's literally just whoever can get their hands on enough GPUs and power infrastructure. TSMC and the power companies are the real kingmakers here. You can have all the talent in the world but if you can't get 100k H100s and a dedicated power plant, you're out.
Wonder how much of this $13B is just prepaying for compute vs actual opex. If it's mostly compute, we're watching something weird happen - like the privatization of Manhattan Project-scale infrastructure. Except instead of enriching uranium we're computing gradient descents lol
The wildest part is we might look back at this as cheap. GPT-4 training was what, $100M? GPT-5/Opus-4 class probably $1B+? At this rate GPT-7 will need its own sovereign wealth fund
Whatever it is, the signal it's sending of Anthropic insiders is negative for AI investors.
Other comments having read a few hundred comments here:
- there is so much confusion, uncertainty, and fanciful thinking that it reminds me of the other bubbles that existed when people had to stretch their imaginations to justify valuations
- there is increasing spend on training models, and decreasing improvements in new models. This does not bode well
- wealth is an extremely difficult thing to define. It's defined vaguely through things like cooperation and trade. Ultimately these llms actually do need to create "wealth" to justify the massive investments made. If they don't do this fast this house of cards is going to fall, fast.
- having worked in finance and spoken to finance types for a long time: they are not geniuses. They are far from it. Most people went into finance because of an interest in money. Just because these people have $13bn of other people's money at their disposal doesn't mean they are any smarter than people orders of magnitude poorer. Don't assume they know what they are doing.
With all these models converging, the big players aren’t demonstrating a real technical innovation moat. Everyone knows how to build these models now, it just takes a ton of cash to do it.
This whole thing is turning into an expensive race to the bottom. Cool tech, but bad business. A lot of VC folks gonna lose their shirt in this space.
Narrow point: In general, one person’s impression of what is crazy does not fare well against market-generated information.
Broader point: If you think you know more than the market, all other things equal, you’re probably wrong.
Lesson: Only searching for reasons why you are right is a fishing expedition.
If the investment levels are irrational, to what degree are they? How and why? How will it play out specifically? Predicting these accurately is hard.
It's at least possible that the investment pays off. These investors almost certainly aren't insane or stupid.
We may still be in a bubble, but before you declare money doesn't mean anything any more and start buying put options I'd probably look for more compelling evidence than this.
[1]: It was $3B at the end of May (so likely $250M in May alone), and $5B at end of july (so $400M that month).
I expect the next breakthroughs to be all about efficiency. Granted, that could be tomorrow, or in 5 years, and the AI companies have to stay all at in the meantime.
- Buy an old warehouse and a bunch of GPUs
- Hire your local tech dude to set up the machines and install some open-source LLMs
- Connect your machines to a routing service that matches customers who want LLM inference with providers
If the service goes down for a day, the owner just loses a day's worth of income, nobody else cares (it's not like customers are going to be screaming at you to find their data). This kind of passive, turn-key business is a dream for many investors. Comparable passive investments like car washes, real estate, laundromats, self-storage, etc are messier.
($100-plan, no agents, no mcp, one session at a time)
Are they putting Canadian public funds into Anthropic?
[1]https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-tells-investor-not...
On a long enough timeframe, the open source models will catch up to the proprietary models and inference providers will beat these proprietary companies on price.
That applies to individuals, but it probably also applies to companies. We're in an AI boom? Raise some money while it's easy.
I got the impression that some people were reselling access and adding layers of fees to profit from the hype.
My feeble uncle isn't allowed to buy a single lightbulb in his state yet , but burning terawatts for useless porn generators is where we are investing our engineering efforts.
5 minutes into my first opus prompt on Claude Code on an empty repo, I've already been warned by Claude Code that I'm about to hit my opus limit despite not using it in 12 days.
Intellectual engagement goes down, users get dumber and only look at quantity. China is taking first steps to continue its excellence. In the New York Post of all places:
https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/china-restricts-ai-...
"It’s just one of the ways China protects their youth, while we feed ours into the jaws of Big Tech in the name of progress."
Iconiq (Mark Zuckerberg's family office) was one of the lead investors in the round
I think one key question is can Anthropic replicate this on some other segment. Like with people working with financials.
What a fantastic amount of money flying around though, to support my inane queries to Claude.
chat gpt 5 in codex is really good
so much that i stopped used claude code altogether
cheaper too
made me realize nobody has moat, coders especially will just go to whoever provides best bang for their buck.
I am very curious about the GAAP numbers here.
Impressive in the valuation, terrifying in the fact that they need to keep raising and these valuations might not prove justifiable
However, I remembered when Youtube was young. It was burning money every month on bandwidth.
After selling out to Google, it took another decade to turned profit. But it did. And it achieved its end game. As the winner, it took all of the video hosting market. And Google reaped the entirety of that win.
This AI race is playing out the same way. The winner has the ability to disrupt several FAANGs and FAANG neighbors (eg. Adobe). And that’s 1-2 trillion dollar market, combined.
It'll take a solid year and about 30k.
Any chance of even talking to a VC as an outsider?
That’s just about the most tangible benefit I see this AI breakthrough delivering. What an asset to have too, socially and civilly, especially when compared to the west’s primary adversary: the CCCP and its communist message of ‘equality’ for the people when they’re still working six days a week!
> Headline: OpenAI raises 400 Trillion, proclaims dominion over the delta quadrant
> Top comment: This just proves that it's a bubble. No AI company has been profitable, we're in the era of diminishing returns. I don't know one real use case for AI
It's hilarious how routinely bearish this site is about AI. I guess it makes sense given how much AI devalues siloed tech expertise.
It's hard to escape the conclusion this is dumb money jumping on a bandwagon. To justify the expected returns here requires someone to make a transformer like leap again, and that doesn't take spending huge amounts in one place, but funding a lot more speculative thinkers.