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Personally, I’m just exhausted. They are not obligated to be truthful here, so the entire thing is interpreted based on vibes. If you are an AI booster, this is

by Zafira 4mo ago

Personally, I’m just exhausted. They are not obligated to be truthful here, so the entire thing is interpreted based on vibes. If you are an AI booster, this is proof that the demand is there; if you aren’t, you’re baffled at where these numbers are coming from.

xyzzyz 4mo ago
How are they “not obligated to be truthful”? Lying to investors is literally a crime.
- mullingitover 4mo ago
  In 2026 what really even is financial crime, other than failing to grease the right palms?
- Zafira 4mo ago
  You need to think about this more creatively. What we are talking about is entirely based on this one term in the announcement: run-rate revenue. This is a meaningless term just like how “clinically proven” for vitamins is a way for the companies to use weasel words to imply something without truly being able to back it up, but also not actually lying. There is no legal definition of “clinically proven” so, what exactly would you sue them for? The same thing is true for run-rate revenue. They can cherry pick numbers to use to generate the run-rate revenue value and they are not lying, but this isn’t exactly honest either. We have no transparency and run-rate revenue is not an accounting term. This goes back to my entire point, this is a vibe. This announcement does not provide much in the way of substance, so a reader will take it to say whatever they want.
  - shimman 4mo ago
    You need to give these people actual examples because rarely can they see the line between two dots. A great example of cooking the books is to do circular investments, adopt a bunch of users that are likely to churn, or to take your single "best" week of revenue then multiple it by 52. All things to over inflate the perceived value of an IPO. IDK if these tricks would work anymore but then again fraud is legal now so who knows.
- cookiengineer 4mo ago
  > How are they “not obligated to be truthful”? Lying to investors is literally a crime. In the US? Hahaha, that was a good one, buddy.
- foobiekr 4mo ago
  Are you familiar with Elon Musk's endless, repeated and obvious lies for the last decade?
- e9 4mo ago
  Private companies are not obligated to report GAAP numbers which means they can creatively twist numbers while still be truthful until they go public
simonw 4mo ago
I think lying about their numbers now is risky if they're planning on an IPO this year - the real figures will come out in the S-1, and investors don't like untrustworthy companies. Update: this inspired a note on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/29/anthropic/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/29/anthropic/
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
  > (Also in Axios today is an anonymously sourced note that "An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees" - times that by 12 and you get an extra $6 billion in annualized run-rate!) This one client, then, is 12.8% of Anthropic's run-rate revenue? That does not exactly fill me with confidence that it's a meaningful number. Doesn't this suggest run-rate revenue will fall off a cliff if Anthropic customers start applying cost controls?
  - simonw 4mo ago
    Maybe? We don't know if that Axios anonymous note is accurate, and we don't know how Anthropic are actually calculating annualized run-rate - I'm just guessing that they might be taking that monthly number x12. If they really did count that one customer as $6B it means they've gone from $30B in April to a mere $41B in May.
  - 3ff 4mo ago
    lmao got him. im really not sure why he keeps parroting on about this. its all irrelevant frankly. companies play games. non-gaap revenue recognition, adjusted operating income.... boo-ya. wait for the somewhat official doc's to come out, then its worth talking about.
    - shimman 4mo ago
      Yeah, until they release their S1 all numbers are highly suspect.
c0rruptbytes 4mo ago
i would assume investors giving billions of dollars have done their due diligence and not base it off vibes...
- duped 4mo ago
  Investors would never give billions of dollars to liars
  - sandeepkd 4mo ago
    Idk if anyone cares about lying at this point anymore, this is just placing bets on the AI, and its a lot easier to bet when its someone else's money.
- ajyoon 4mo ago
  Investors made bad decisions all the time. The proof is in revenue.
- iancmceachern 4mo ago
  I used to think this too. Now I know different.
- bnagh 4mo ago
  They get in now because they want a high IPO exit. They care about the perception of the numbers, not about reality. If you think investment banks will catch them during the IPO: They have launched many overpriced IPOs in 1999/2000 and also want a high IPO price.
  - sberens 4mo ago
    Investors are usually prevented from selling until 180 days after IPO
    - throwaway85825 4mo ago
      The rules can be changed, they did for spacex.
semiquaver 4mo ago
> They are not obligated to be truthful here What are you talking about? It’s securities fraud for a CEO to lie about the financials of a company regardless of whether it’s public or private.
- 33vss 4mo ago
  more than likely what he meant is their metrics may be non-GAAP.
- rchaud 4mo ago
  And the punishment for securities fraud is a slap on the wrist, as Tesla proved with its "going private at $420/share, funding secured" tweet. Who cares about a $40m fine from an increasingly toothless regulator when your investors have already fronted $1.5 billion to settle copyright infringement claims? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y4jpg922qo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y4jpg922qo
reilly3000 4mo ago
I think the level of panic in CFO offices every where about AI cost explosion directionally validates that the spending is real.
- trhway 4mo ago
  As Anthropic with all its revenue still needs a large outside capital, it suggests that those AI costs those CFOs pay probably don't cover the actual Anthropic's costs.
- jimnotgym 4mo ago
  As that sort of person myself, albeit not in a software company right now, my thought process would be this. 1) I have a new extra cost 2) How does that make me more profit, and improved cashflow I know I'll be bombarded with metrics about productivity, feature completion, bug fixes etc. But someone is going to have to tell me how that equates to more sales. And who is going to do that? I'll be worried that the feature wishlist will just creep up now we can handle more throughput, and yet everyone will be telling me that I don't need to worry about the lack of new customers this quarter, one more new feature and we will catch up in Q4. You can see how that could make one grumpy. Then when the sales don't come, I'll tell the CTO that they need to balance the books, if they want to use expensive tools to make each developer more productive then they will need fewer developers... ...but I don't want that, I want more great features that people will pay for, and faster. But they have to pay for themselves.
- ricardobayes 4mo ago
  There is no panic, it's misreporting and bad journalism. 2025 AI budgets were based on 2025 AI capabilities, and let's face it, LLMs only got acceptable in around November 2025. So it's natural usage went up and budgets didn't account for that.
  - aprilthird2021 4mo ago
    There's absolutely someone in every big company except the biggest tech companies in the world looking at spend these days because of exactly what you said. The models are good now which means people use them a lot more which means money is flying out the door more than ever before (and the impact on the businesses hasn't shown up yet as you might notice in the earnings of any business that isn't a frontier AI company)
crowcroft 4mo ago
I mean, they're not a public company, but there are still laws that exist...
wookmaster 4mo ago
A lot of companies are mandating token use, there's certainly a smell going on here but I have no idea why all the CEO's got onboard unless they all get some of that stock. AI psychosis is very real.
mgfist 4mo ago
I started a new job recently after 9 months off. Last Sept I was coding almost entirely by hand, using AI for q/a, debugging and such. In my new job I haven't written a single line by hand. I now almost entirely work in claude code / codex and in github PRs. Occasionally I open vscode to read code, but very rarely. My company probably spends ~$100 a day for my token use. I'm not even going crazy with parallelization or subagents and such. I 100% believe the demand growth based on my personal experience.
- Traubenfuchs 4mo ago
  Talking to dev friends, dev colleagues and qa colleagues in a space where everyone is doing high volume CRUD and cloud slop with many microservices and constantly evolving business requirements: Every single one is primarily coding with claude, a few with cursor. Handwriting code is dead.

by Zafira 4mo ago

xyzzyz 4mo ago

How are they “not obligated to be truthful”? Lying to investors is literally a crime.

mullingitover 4mo ago
In 2026 what really even is financial crime, other than failing to grease the right palms?
Zafira 4mo ago
You need to think about this more creatively. What we are talking about is entirely based on this one term in the announcement: run-rate revenue. This is a meaningless term just like how “clinically proven” for vitamins is a way for the companies to use weasel words to imply something without truly being able to back it up, but also not actually lying. There is no legal definition of “clinically proven” so, what exactly would you sue them for? The same thing is true for run-rate revenue. They can cherry pick numbers to use to generate the run-rate revenue value and they are not lying, but this isn’t exactly honest either. We have no transparency and run-rate revenue is not an accounting term. This goes back to my entire point, this is a vibe. This announcement does not provide much in the way of substance, so a reader will take it to say whatever they want.
- shimman 4mo ago
  You need to give these people actual examples because rarely can they see the line between two dots. A great example of cooking the books is to do circular investments, adopt a bunch of users that are likely to churn, or to take your single "best" week of revenue then multiple it by 52. All things to over inflate the perceived value of an IPO. IDK if these tricks would work anymore but then again fraud is legal now so who knows.
cookiengineer 4mo ago
> How are they “not obligated to be truthful”? Lying to investors is literally a crime. In the US? Hahaha, that was a good one, buddy.
foobiekr 4mo ago
Are you familiar with Elon Musk's endless, repeated and obvious lies for the last decade?
e9 4mo ago
Private companies are not obligated to report GAAP numbers which means they can creatively twist numbers while still be truthful until they go public

simonw 4mo ago

I think lying about their numbers now is risky if they're planning on an IPO this year - the real figures will come out in the S-1, and investors don't like untrustworthy companies. Update: this inspired a note on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/29/anthropic/ https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/29/anthropic/

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
> (Also in Axios today is an anonymously sourced note that "An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees" - times that by 12 and you get an extra $6 billion in annualized run-rate!) This one client, then, is 12.8% of Anthropic's run-rate revenue? That does not exactly fill me with confidence that it's a meaningful number. Doesn't this suggest run-rate revenue will fall off a cliff if Anthropic customers start applying cost controls?
- simonw 4mo ago
  Maybe? We don't know if that Axios anonymous note is accurate, and we don't know how Anthropic are actually calculating annualized run-rate - I'm just guessing that they might be taking that monthly number x12. If they really did count that one customer as $6B it means they've gone from $30B in April to a mere $41B in May.
- 3ff 4mo ago
  lmao got him. im really not sure why he keeps parroting on about this. its all irrelevant frankly. companies play games. non-gaap revenue recognition, adjusted operating income.... boo-ya. wait for the somewhat official doc's to come out, then its worth talking about.
  - shimman 4mo ago
    Yeah, until they release their S1 all numbers are highly suspect.

c0rruptbytes 4mo ago

i would assume investors giving billions of dollars have done their due diligence and not base it off vibes...

duped 4mo ago
Investors would never give billions of dollars to liars
- sandeepkd 4mo ago
  Idk if anyone cares about lying at this point anymore, this is just placing bets on the AI, and its a lot easier to bet when its someone else's money.
ajyoon 4mo ago
Investors made bad decisions all the time. The proof is in revenue.
iancmceachern 4mo ago
I used to think this too. Now I know different.
bnagh 4mo ago
They get in now because they want a high IPO exit. They care about the perception of the numbers, not about reality. If you think investment banks will catch them during the IPO: They have launched many overpriced IPOs in 1999/2000 and also want a high IPO price.
- sberens 4mo ago
  Investors are usually prevented from selling until 180 days after IPO
  - throwaway85825 4mo ago
    The rules can be changed, they did for spacex.

semiquaver 4mo ago

> They are not obligated to be truthful here What are you talking about? It’s securities fraud for a CEO to lie about the financials of a company regardless of whether it’s public or private.

33vss 4mo ago
more than likely what he meant is their metrics may be non-GAAP.
rchaud 4mo ago
And the punishment for securities fraud is a slap on the wrist, as Tesla proved with its "going private at $420/share, funding secured" tweet. Who cares about a $40m fine from an increasingly toothless regulator when your investors have already fronted $1.5 billion to settle copyright infringement claims? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y4jpg922qo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y4jpg922qo

reilly3000 4mo ago

I think the level of panic in CFO offices every where about AI cost explosion directionally validates that the spending is real.

trhway 4mo ago
As Anthropic with all its revenue still needs a large outside capital, it suggests that those AI costs those CFOs pay probably don't cover the actual Anthropic's costs.
jimnotgym 4mo ago
As that sort of person myself, albeit not in a software company right now, my thought process would be this. 1) I have a new extra cost 2) How does that make me more profit, and improved cashflow I know I'll be bombarded with metrics about productivity, feature completion, bug fixes etc. But someone is going to have to tell me how that equates to more sales. And who is going to do that? I'll be worried that the feature wishlist will just creep up now we can handle more throughput, and yet everyone will be telling me that I don't need to worry about the lack of new customers this quarter, one more new feature and we will catch up in Q4. You can see how that could make one grumpy. Then when the sales don't come, I'll tell the CTO that they need to balance the books, if they want to use expensive tools to make each developer more productive then they will need fewer developers... ...but I don't want that, I want more great features that people will pay for, and faster. But they have to pay for themselves.
ricardobayes 4mo ago
There is no panic, it's misreporting and bad journalism. 2025 AI budgets were based on 2025 AI capabilities, and let's face it, LLMs only got acceptable in around November 2025. So it's natural usage went up and budgets didn't account for that.
- aprilthird2021 4mo ago
  There's absolutely someone in every big company except the biggest tech companies in the world looking at spend these days because of exactly what you said. The models are good now which means people use them a lot more which means money is flying out the door more than ever before (and the impact on the businesses hasn't shown up yet as you might notice in the earnings of any business that isn't a frontier AI company)

crowcroft 4mo ago

I mean, they're not a public company, but there are still laws that exist...

wookmaster 4mo ago

A lot of companies are mandating token use, there's certainly a smell going on here but I have no idea why all the CEO's got onboard unless they all get some of that stock. AI psychosis is very real.

mgfist 4mo ago

I started a new job recently after 9 months off. Last Sept I was coding almost entirely by hand, using AI for q/a, debugging and such. In my new job I haven't written a single line by hand. I now almost entirely work in claude code / codex and in github PRs. Occasionally I open vscode to read code, but very rarely. My company probably spends ~$100 a day for my token use. I'm not even going crazy with parallelization or subagents and such. I 100% believe the demand growth based on my personal experience.

Traubenfuchs 4mo ago
Talking to dev friends, dev colleagues and qa colleagues in a space where everyone is doing high volume CRUD and cloud slop with many microservices and constantly evolving business requirements: Every single one is primarily coding with claude, a few with cursor. Handwriting code is dead.