alt Hacker NewsLost in the cacophony is the fact that Anthropic fumbled a strong lifeline while hemorrhaging cash without a business model. It’s fun to look down at OpenAI but they may not get another chance like this again.
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Anthropic is the leading enterprise LLM provider. All they have to do is keep building a best-performing product, charge what they need, and keep costs as far down as possible. If my company knew there were an LLM 1.5x as good as Opus, they would be willing to pay 3x the cost. If it were being sold by Anthropic, they’d be even more likely to pay, since we could easily keep our same tooling.
This government contract was a very small part of anthropic revenue. Almost negligible. Their 2026 revenue is projected to be $14 billion to $20 billion. This contract was $200M over 2 years.
It's fun to say that Anthropic doesn't have a business model, but clearly they do. Hopefully they can achieve it while maintaining their standards, even if in the eyes of some that's 'fumbling a strong lifeline'.
OpenAI smells desperate, and is already understood to be overextended. It isn't Anthropic that retired their flashy video gen platform, ceding competitive ground to Google.
whatever you say boss
Claude has had such a massive increase in usage since being labeled a supply chain risk the service has been struggling to scale to meet increase demand.
On top of that, the prevailing opinion seemed to be that courts would overrule the supply chain risk designation, allowing the government and its subcontractors to use Claude again.
It’s hard to see how they could have navigated this better