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San Francisco-based AI startup Anthropic says the explosive demand for artificial intelligence tools is growing so rapidly that even the company itself is struggling to keep pace.
Speaking at the company’s annual developer conference in San Francisco, Dario Amodei said Anthropic had initially expected to grow roughly 10 times this year. Instead, demand for its AI products has accelerated to levels that could make the company nearly 80 times larger than it was a year ago.
“I hope that 80-times growth doesn’t continue because that’s just crazy and it’s too hard to handle,” Amodei said during a fireside chat with co-founder Daniela Amodei.
The comments underline the extraordinary pace at which generative AI adoption is spreading across industries, particularly among software developers and enterprise customers racing to integrate AI into daily operations.
Anthropic, one of the world’s leading AI startups, has emerged as a major challenger to OpenAI with its Claude family of models and the fast-growing Claude Code coding assistant. The company said last month that its annualised revenue run rate had surpassed $30 billion, sharply higher than the roughly $9 billion recorded at the end of 2025.
The hyper-growth has also exposed one of the AI industry’s biggest bottlenecks: access to computing power.
Amodei said Anthropic’s infrastructure has been stretched thin as customers increasingly use AI models for software engineering, automation and enterprise workflows.
To address the shortfall, Anthropic announced an agreement with SpaceX that gives the company access to all available computing capacity at the aerospace firm’s Colossus One data centre in Memphis.
According to Anthropic, the arrangement provides access to more than 220,000 Nvidia AI chips and could eventually pave the way for AI-focused data centres in space.
Anthropic’s rapid rise has been fuelled largely by the success of Claude Code, which has become one of Silicon Valley’s most widely discussed AI programming tools over the past year.
Amodei said software engineers tend to adopt new technologies faster than most professions, making coding the first major proving ground for generative AI. But he argued that the transformation now underway in software development would eventually spread across the broader economy.
“Coding has changed forever. Finance is next,” a presentation slide shown during the event declared.
The company also unveiled 10 AI-powered financial agents designed for banks, insurers and investment firms. The tools can perform tasks such as building pitchbooks, drafting credit memos and auditing financial statements with limited human supervision.
Anthropic said financial services have rapidly become one of its largest enterprise businesses, with institutions including Goldman Sachs, Visa, Citigroup and AIG already using its AI systems.
The startup said financial firms now account for 40 per cent of its top 50 customers and represent its second-largest enterprise revenue category after technology companies.
Amodei also delivered a stark warning for traditional software firms facing disruption from increasingly capable AI systems.
Speaking alongside Jamie Dimon at the event, the Anthropic chief executive said AI would make software development dramatically cheaper while potentially threatening existing software-as-a-service business models.
Anthropic has increasingly positioned itself as both a builder and a public commentator on the risks of advanced AI systems. Amodei has previously warned about large-scale disruption to white-collar employment and predicted that AI could soon write nearly all software code.
Founded by former OpenAI researchers, Anthropic spent the early years of the generative AI boom lagging behind ChatGPT’s explosive popularity. But the rapid adoption of Claude Code since late 2025 has transformed the company into one of the sector’s fastest-growing players.
The company’s ambitions are also expanding financially. According to a recent report by the Financial Times, Anthropic is exploring plans to raise tens of billions of dollars later this year to fund a massive expansion in computing infrastructure — a move that could push its valuation close to $1 trillion.
Anthropic has already secured backing from major technology giants. Last month, Google committed up to another $40 billion in investment, while Amazon has agreed to invest as much as $25 billion in the startup.
With inputs from agencies.
Speaking at the company’s annual developer conference in San Francisco, Dario Amodei said Anthropic had initially expected to grow roughly 10 times this year. Instead, demand for its AI products has accelerated to levels that could make the company nearly 80 times larger than it was a year ago.
“I hope that 80-times growth doesn’t continue because that’s just crazy and it’s too hard to handle,” Amodei said during a fireside chat with co-founder Daniela Amodei.
The comments underline the extraordinary pace at which generative AI adoption is spreading across industries, particularly among software developers and enterprise customers racing to integrate AI into daily operations.
Anthropic, one of the world’s leading AI startups, has emerged as a major challenger to OpenAI with its Claude family of models and the fast-growing Claude Code coding assistant. The company said last month that its annualised revenue run rate had surpassed $30 billion, sharply higher than the roughly $9 billion recorded at the end of 2025.
Computing crunch forces infrastructure scramble
The hyper-growth has also exposed one of the AI industry’s biggest bottlenecks: access to computing power.
Amodei said Anthropic’s infrastructure has been stretched thin as customers increasingly use AI models for software engineering, automation and enterprise workflows.
To address the shortfall, Anthropic announced an agreement with SpaceX that gives the company access to all available computing capacity at the aerospace firm’s Colossus One data centre in Memphis.
According to Anthropic, the arrangement provides access to more than 220,000 Nvidia AI chips and could eventually pave the way for AI-focused data centres in space.
AI coding boom reshapes industry
Anthropic’s rapid rise has been fuelled largely by the success of Claude Code, which has become one of Silicon Valley’s most widely discussed AI programming tools over the past year.
Amodei said software engineers tend to adopt new technologies faster than most professions, making coding the first major proving ground for generative AI. But he argued that the transformation now underway in software development would eventually spread across the broader economy.
“Coding has changed forever. Finance is next,” a presentation slide shown during the event declared.
The company also unveiled 10 AI-powered financial agents designed for banks, insurers and investment firms. The tools can perform tasks such as building pitchbooks, drafting credit memos and auditing financial statements with limited human supervision.
Anthropic said financial services have rapidly become one of its largest enterprise businesses, with institutions including Goldman Sachs, Visa, Citigroup and AIG already using its AI systems.
The startup said financial firms now account for 40 per cent of its top 50 customers and represent its second-largest enterprise revenue category after technology companies.
Warning for software companies
Amodei also delivered a stark warning for traditional software firms facing disruption from increasingly capable AI systems.
Speaking alongside Jamie Dimon at the event, the Anthropic chief executive said AI would make software development dramatically cheaper while potentially threatening existing software-as-a-service business models.
Anthropic has increasingly positioned itself as both a builder and a public commentator on the risks of advanced AI systems. Amodei has previously warned about large-scale disruption to white-collar employment and predicted that AI could soon write nearly all software code.
Founded by former OpenAI researchers, Anthropic spent the early years of the generative AI boom lagging behind ChatGPT’s explosive popularity. But the rapid adoption of Claude Code since late 2025 has transformed the company into one of the sector’s fastest-growing players.
The company’s ambitions are also expanding financially. According to a recent report by the Financial Times, Anthropic is exploring plans to raise tens of billions of dollars later this year to fund a massive expansion in computing infrastructure — a move that could push its valuation close to $1 trillion.
Anthropic has already secured backing from major technology giants. Last month, Google committed up to another $40 billion in investment, while Amazon has agreed to invest as much as $25 billion in the startup.
With inputs from agencies.
