Some people still dismiss AI as mere hype, but AI companies now have numbers to prove it’s anything but.
Anthropic’s revenue has risen from $100 million in 2023 to $4.5 billion now, CEO Dario Amodei has said. That’s a 45x increase in 18 months. Amodei says that Anthropic’s revenue is growing 10x every year.
“If you look at revenue, Anthropic’s revenue every year has grown 10x,” Amodei said in an interview. “Every year we’re kind of conservative and we say, it can’t grow 10x this time. I never assume anything, and actually always I am very conservative in saying I think it’s going to slow down on the business side. But we went from zero to $100 million in 2023, we went from $100 million to $1 billion in 2024, and this year, in the first half of the year, we’ve gone from $1 billion to, I think as of speaking today, it’s well above $4 billion, it might be $4.5 billion,” he added.
“I see this exponential and I say, look, people aren’t very good at making sense of exponentials, right? If something is doubling every 6 months, then 2 years before it happens, it looks like it’s only 1/16th of the way there. And so we are sitting here in the middle of 2025, and the models are really starting to explode in terms of the economy,” he said.
Amodei said that it wasn’t inconceivable that this frenetic growth continued for some more time. “And so if you think about it, suppose that exponential continued for 2 years. I’m not saying it will, but suppose it continued for 2 years. You’re well into the $100 billions. I’m not saying that’ll happen. I’m saying the situation is that when you’re on an exponential, you can really get fooled by it,” he said.
$4.5 billion in annual revenue is nothing to be sneezed at. The company was founded just four years ago in 2021, and is already making as much money as many companies take decades to make. Anthropic isn’t the only AI company that’s seeing its growth be supercharged — Lovable has become a unicorn just 8 months after being founded, and claims to have become the fastest product ever to have hit $100 million ARR. ChatGPT, meanwhile, is now the fifth most visited website in the world. It remains to be seen if this growth in AI continues, but these numbers show that AI is far from just hype — people are spending time and paying massive sums of money to be able to use AI models.