AI impact: Anthropic’s revenue grew from zero to $14 billion in 3 years, while Indian IT fortunes dwindled
Anthropic is once again in the news. This time the company is creating discussion on social media through a chart, which shows that its revenue run rate has gone from zero to $14 billion in just 3 years. This figure is in stark contrast to Indian IT companies, whose revenues have remained stagnant over the same period.
There are moments in the technology industry when a single number makes everyone stop. This week the number is $14 billion and it is generating a lot of buzz on social media, especially among those who keep a keen eye on technology, business, and the business of technology. That’s because $14 billion is the annual revenue run rate that Anthropic says it has reached less than three years after earning its first dollar.
This figure was revealed by Anthropic in a chart that left viewers wondering. After all, achieving an estimated revenue of $14 billion – Rs 1,26,889 crore – in just three years makes Anthropic arguably the fastest-growing company in history. Here is the chart in question:
Explaining its charts, Anthropic says its revenue has grown more than 10 times annually for three consecutive years. Therefore, the company has now reported a $14 billion run rate. According to its blog, the number of customers spending more than $100,000 annually on its cloud AI has grown sevenfold in the past year. Two years ago, only about a dozen customers were spending more than $1 million annually with the company. Today, this figure is more than 500. It even claims that “8 out of Fortune 10 companies are now cloud customers.”
However, it should be noted that Anthropic is not profitable at the moment, and may not be for at least a few more years. This is because the expenditure on AI development and infrastructure is huge.
As the company dropped off the charts, the reaction from many in the software world was a mix of excitement and unease. Exciting because it shows how quickly AI has moved from experimentation to serious enterprise adoption. The unease is because this growth is coming at a time when traditional IT services companies, including India’s biggest names like Infosys and Wipro, are seeing slow revenue expansion and weak stock performance.
This dichotomy seems stark, almost emblematic of a broader shift underway in global technology as it moves from a world dominated by SaaS and armies of coders to custom products and software created by AI that are managed by only a handful of humans.
A chart that people can’t stop sharing
After Anthropic shared its revenue chart on X, people immediately jumped on it. Itamar Golan, CEO of Prompt Security, said, “Anthropic is now at a run rate of $14 billion. We are watching a new software giant form in real time.” Matthew Ollivier, another tech industry veteran, said: “All the figures related to Anthropic and cloud code revenues are absolutely absurd.”
Interestingly, some commentators have made the connection that we are seeing this play out in the stock market. SaaS Connection. Responding to a post, an
In fact, what makes the anthropic revenue figures so sobering is the stagnation that traditional IT giants, especially the India-based ones, have seen over the last three years. It is almost as if AI companies have started growing at the expense of Indian IT companies.
Cloud Code, which launched to general users in May 2025, has become a major revenue driver for Anthropic. Its run-rate revenue has exceeded $2.5 billion, more than doubling in the past month. This figure alone would exceed the revenues of many small and medium-sized SaaS companies. In case you haven’t been keeping track, Cloud Code and its sibling Cloud Work are the same tools that sparked a selloff in shares of SaaS IT companies about 10 days ago. This sell-off continues.
Growth of Indian IT companies has stalled
When you put together Anthropic’s revenue growth with the revenue growth of Indian IT companies, you can almost make a case that AI companies like Anthropic are the future while TCS and Infosys and their peers are at their peak. After all, the numbers only tell us so much.
TCS, for example, reported 17.6 percent revenue growth in FY2013 with revenue of Rs 2,25,458 crore. Growth slowed down to 6.8 percent in FY24. It further reduced to 6 percent in fiscal year 2025. This is at a time when anthropogenic is on the rise.
At Infosys, revenue growth stood at 20.7 per cent in FY2013, at a time when AI was just on the horizon but not yet in place. In FY24, as AI started making its presence felt, Infosys’ numbers fell sharply to 4.7 percent. FY2015 saw a modest recovery of 6.1 percent, still well below the earlier pace.
HCL Tech also saw strong double-digit expansion in FY23 at 8.3 per cent in FY24 and around 6.5 per cent in FY25.
The stock’s performance over the last six months adds another layer to the story. According to Groww data, in the last six months, TCS shares have fallen by more than 11 per cent, Infosys has fallen by about 4 per cent, HCL Tech has fallen by about 3 per cent and Wipro has fallen by more than 11 per cent.
When compared to Anthropic’s chart, these numbers show a world that is changing rapidly. Of course, the future has not been written yet. AI companies, even if they are stirring the stock market and getting hype in the real world, are still not profitable. But as a technology, AI is slowly becoming a disruptor and many have warned that it will. This disruption could mean that companies like Anthropic can eat away at traditional IT companies. And they’ll likely do it faster and with far fewer employees. For example, Anthropic, now generating estimated revenues of $14 billion per year, has only 2500 employees.