Understanding AI

Understanding AI

It still doesn’t look like there’s an AI bubble

Anthropic's annualized revenue doubled in just two months.

Timothy B. Lee's avatar
Timothy B. Lee
Mar 16, 2026
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Last fall, a lot of people were worried about a possible AI bubble. AI companies were investing heavily in infrastructure because they expected huge demand for AI services in the coming years. For example, an internal OpenAI document last fall projected that revenue would more than double — from $13 billion in 2025 to $30 billion in 2026. Around the same time, Anthropic expected revenue to triple from $4.7 billion in 2025 to more than $15 billion in 2026.

Skeptics didn’t believe companies this large could grow so quickly. But the last few months haven’t gone the way they expected.

Anthropic has posted particularly strong revenue numbers. The company exited 2025 generating revenue at a $9 billion annualized rate. In February, the company announced that its annualized revenue had reached $14 billion. A few weeks after that, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic’s annualized revenue had soared to $19 billion.

These are annualized figures, so Anthropic hasn’t actually earned $19 billion yet this year. (Roughly speaking, annualized revenue is monthly revenue multiplied by 12.) But if customers continue spending at the same rate, Anthropic will easily surpass $15 billion in revenue for 2026. And if revenue continues rising (as seems likely), Anthropic will take in far more than $15 billion this year.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. (Photo by Ludovic MARIN / AFP via Getty Images.)

Other AI companies have not enjoyed the same meteoric growth as Anthropic, but demand for AI services has been healthy across the industry.

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