Catalyst Watch
80x Growth
Welcome to Catalyst Watch at The Transcript, a report that highlights investment themes from this week’s newsletter. This week’s edition is available for all subscribers.
1. Will Traditional Apps Get Disintermediated By New UIs?
The most shocking headline of last week may have been that Anthropic crossed $30B in run rate revenue–an 80x growth rate. The company currently finds itself compute-constrained because it “only” planned for a 10x growth rate.
Anthropic’s results confirm that enterprise customers are adopting AI tools at a rapid pace and are also willing to pay for them. This diffuses some of the bear arguments on AI from last year that companies are not generating real ROI from AI. Companies appear to be generating enough ROI to justify rapidly increasing their AI spending and even going so far as to limit headcount growth to invest more in AI.
“I would say, candidly, when we set up budgets for 2026 in November, we underestimated the amount of impact the AI tools could have. And obviously, in December, we had new models come in. So we’ve re-upped our investment here. And as Dara said, we are trading that off against incremental headcount growth” - Uber Technologies (UBER 0.94%↑) CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy
Between 60% and 70% of new code appears to be being written by AI now, especially at tech-forward companies like DoorDash and Airbnb.
