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

Anthropic's annualized revenue doubled in just two months.

This post originally appeared in Understanding AI.

“Rather than writing code themselves, programmers increasingly give high-level instructions to agents, have the agents write the code, and then check the code afterward.”

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.