Why Moving Fast in AI Beats Moving Safe

Anthropic hits $965 billion valuation, files for IPO, and passes OpenAI. Here's what happened and what matters for AI-native founders building on Claude, where you need to understand which AI platform is really winning the enterprise race so you can make the right bet on your core infrastructure in the future before the IPO window reshuffles the deck. Some facts: Anthropic submitted a confidential draft S-1 to the SEC on June 1st, initiating the process for a potential trillion-dollar public debut. This was covered by TechCrunch and Fortune. The filing followed the close of a $65 billion Series H that lifted the company's post-money valuation to $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI's last private round of $852 billion from March 2026. Revenue run rate hit approximately $47 billion in May 2026, up from roughly $10 billion the prior year. Nearly 5x growth in 12 months. Q2 2026 is projected to be Anthropic's first quarter of operating profit at approximately $559 million on $10.9 billion of quarterly revenue. Anthropic hired Karpathy, OpenAI co-founder, who joined May 19th, and Eric Boyd, uh, former Microsoft Azure AI president, who joined in April. The two most significant talent shifts for them recently. There's an interesting talent flow ratio for those in the know. Engineers leaving OpenAI for Anthropic at a rate of 8 to 1, and from Google DeepMind at 11 to 1 in Anthropic's favor. OpenAI also logged a triple executive exit on April 18th, where CPO Kevin Weil, Sora head Bill Peebles, and Enterprise CTO Srinivas Narayanan all departed simultaneously. This comes on the heels of their, uh, Project Glasswing expansion with Mythos and Opus 4.8 dropping. Jonathan, what do you think of this impending IPO, which is probably going to be one of the biggest ones in our lifetime?

Yeah, it's quite a year, right? Um, you have Anthropic IPO, you have SpaceX, uh, and you have OpenAI, all going to be some of the biggest IPOs ever. The numbers are really backing it up, uh, and Anthropic showing profitability. On top of what, 80x year-over-year revenue growth. It's just a new animal. Like, you know, it's like the markets have never seen something quite like this. And I think it's up to every individual investor to say, you know, what's the long-term value of this? How long will this growth in revenue stick around? How important will this company be a year from now, 2 years from now, 5 years from now? Like, Anthropic is the darling of, you know, like the CFO who filled the round. Was so selective about the people that could be in this, this $965 billion round. Like there were no SPVs. They had so much demand for it. They could just be selective of exactly the investors they wanted to bring on. That's so rare to be able to raise money at that scale with so much demand for it. I could also see a world where, you know, revenue stalls, enterprise companies aren't getting the ROI they expect. There's kind of like, you know, a dip in the hype cycle and it's going to come back. It's going to whiplash that much harder for anthropic, you know, in those kind of conditions. But maybe they can be up with NVIDIA in terms of like, you know, getting to the $4 trillion range before that even happens. And so unprecedented. It's just like, you know, so I don't know, what do you think? Are you going to buy some shares when they go public? Do you think you'll ride the wave or—

it's just like, personally, I might as well buy a share, you know, just to be like, I have my ticket. Like, yeah, let's go. Probably at least do that, you know, just for fun. I predict it's going to zigzag a lot where it's like seesaws, like hype cycle, low hype, high hype. And between those cycles will be the real in-the-details enterprise adoption stuff that boils up from the micro details of, hey, we blew the alerts. Oh, the cost budget. Oh, do we have an internal through line to like greater feature delivery and then capturing economic value? Does every company get that from using these licenses and the tokens? So I think there's going to be some amount of the market figures out the enterprise adoption, every company then starts figuring that out more, especially as these FDEs, for deployed engineers, get deployed into companies and help with driving business outcomes, leveraging Anthropic's tools, leveraging OpenAI's tools, then I think it's gonna be a lot clearer for companies and their decision makers for budget whether the investment is, is really there. And I think we're going to see the same sort of curve we always see with technology lifecycle adoption. There's your innovators, like 2.5% of the population, your early adopters, then early majority, then that's to 50%. Like, I think you're going to see that sort of adoption. Like, the token maxers, for example, having leaderboards, that they're probably in the innovator category. They have to kind of bite the bullet and realize, well, being that leading edge means we're probably going to end up with half billion dollar, uh, monthly spend burns when we didn't really intend to. We made decisions to go fast and then it helps us fail fast, but then we got to course correct better. That I think is the bet of people on the edge using these tools. It'll catapult them towards a learning rate to capture market share away from their competitors more so than say any pitfalls of enterprise AI adoption long term. So it's wild. It's unprecedented. I think it's going to be up and down all around, but overall, like the long-term trajectory outside of any local minimas and maximas, I think is going to go. There's so many surface areas of things that they could do. Like they released a legal plugin earlier this year. That's like a whole ass market. You know, they can just release a plugin overnight and capture market share. So I wouldn't be betting against them personally.