Anthropic’s revenue growth is no joke. Just ask Dario Amodei.
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During a fireside chat on Wednesday, the Anthropic CEO said his AI company had 80x year-over-year growth in revenue and usage in the first quarter.
Amodei added, half-joking, that he hopes this doesn’t continue because that level of hyper-growth is “too hard to handle.” It might be better to have a “mere 10x” growth, he quipped.
Anthropic had planned for anywhere from a “little” revenue growth to 10x, Amodei said, and that gap between expectations and reality is why his company’s computing resources have been stretched thin this year.
The Anthropic CEO made the comments during a conversation with Daniela Amodei, his sister and co-founder, at the company’s Code with Claude developer conference in San Francisco. Anthropic’s Claude Code service has been a stunning success, helping the company’s revenue surge dramatically in recent months.
On Wednesday, Amodei also talked about how new technology doesn’t spread across the economy at an even pace. Software engineers are often the quickest adopters of new tools, and that’s why there’s so much focus on coding so far. But this is a foreshadowing of how things are going to work across the economy, he added.
Amodei has built a reputation as AI’s foremost prognosticator and fear-monger as he speaks and writes regularly about the potential disruption and risk posed by this technology. He estimated in March 2025 that “essentially all” code might be written by AI within a year, and kicked off fears of a so-called “white-collar bloodbath” in a May 2025 interview with Axios.
His company, formed by deserters from OpenAI, straggled behind the ChatGPT creator during the first years of the generative AI boom. But in late 2025, Anthropic’s Claude Code exploded in popularity among developers and supercharged the startup’s revenue growth. Now, the companies are in an all-out race to win over developers and corporate AI customers, the better to fund their massive training and inference bills.
On Wednesday morning, Anthropic announced that it had secured 300 megawatts of new computing power at SpaceX’s Colossus One data center. The deal lands Elon Musk’s company a growing customer, and Anthropic touted immediate benefits: Product chief Ami Vora said the new batch of chips would let developers run Claude Code for longer each day.
Anthropic will continue pitching its models for coding at another in-person event with developers in San Francisco on Thursday.
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