Anthropic is expanding its revenue roughly tenfold each year, even as major technology firms slash their workforces and blame artificial intelligence. The contrast highlights a widening split in the economy, where a handful of AI companies capture explosive growth while others shrink.
The AI safety lab reached a $965 billion valuation through its Series H round in May, then filed confidentially for a public listing on June 1. Secondary market activity has since pushed its implied value close to $1 trillion, placing it above rival OpenAI among the world’s most valuable companies. Anthropic reported a $47 billion revenue run rate, up from around $10 billion a year earlier, with much of that surge driven by Claude Code, its coding tool that now commands a majority share of the enterprise AI coding market.
Meanwhile, several well-known companies moved in the opposite direction. Block cut roughly 40% of its staff, while Cloudflare reduced its workforce by 20% and Coinbase trimmed 14%, all citing AI readiness as a factor. Analysts remain uncertain how much of this reflects genuine AI-driven efficiency and how much simply repackages ordinary layoffs under a fashionable label.
The pattern suggests that stronger companies tend to grow because of AI rather than shrink. Firms with durable products and healthy margins expand their capabilities, while weaker players use automation to justify cost-cutting. This divergence rewards scale and punishes fragility.
Much of the underlying AI growth has flowed into hardware and energy rather than software. Data centers, chips, and power infrastructure absorb enormous investment as companies race to expand compute capacity. That spending concentrates economic gains among a small cluster of firms and their suppliers.
As AI growth accelerates and non-AI sectors contract, the economy is approaching worrying levels of concentration. When a few companies drive most of the market’s momentum, the broader system becomes more fragile, and observers warn this dynamic increasingly resembles bubble territory.
