PG Peter Gostev On ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week

“So you go in one quarter you more than double your revenue. That does not happen. This is not normal business circumstances, right? … Adding five billion in a quarter extra is insane. … There is not a business that I remember ever having that kind of revenue growth.”

ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week · October 2026

Context

Walking through the quarterly revenue chart in Anthropic's S-1, from roughly $2 billion at the end of last year to about $11.5 billion in Q2. He argues the size of the jump has no precedent in business history.

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Transcript

ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week Around 29:15 into the episode

Peter Gostev

…to make is that the this number 16.8 billion this is reporting afterwards this is not as part of the s one but i've included it here because it's kind of looks like they said this to other people so that's the one they reported officially and then this is the next number so which is important just

Alex Volkov

listening peter could you run through quarter and the numbers that are just incredible

Peter Gostev

yeah yeah so uh good good good chart so if you go gonna go through last year it's an average of sort of few hundred million up to two billion at the end of last year then beginning of this year it went up to sort of five billion then q2 11 and a half billion so you go in one quarter you more than double your revenue that does not happen this is not normal business circumstances right and by the way this is before opus 5.5 right opposite five is when we have the next quarter which is reported not reported separately it's 16.8 billion so they've added another five billion on top of their previous growth which is like once again this does not happen there is not a business that i remember ever having that kind of revenues revenue growth and these are not small numbers right you see growth rates and everyone reports growth rates adding five billion in a quarter extra is insane this is very high growth

Alex Volkov

so so we use the word insane a lot on the show and definitely on the timelines this is actually literally quite insane because of i think you know we all talked about cloud code being the side project within ontropic that's suddenly a lot like a general agent that can like now do stuff um i i gotta…

Peter Gostev

yeah one one other worry was that are they just having a few big customers that you know they depend on cursor so much and then cursor switches their models because they got acquired by xai are they going to be screwed and the answer seems to be no so we've got a few ways to look at it one is that…

Alex Volkov

but also the jump specifically the jump between like in the year getting uh almost well almost 10x in the number of customers that are high value it's because well obviously like you know as we talk about news here we know the enterprises catch up slowly we know this but then when they do catch up…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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