Whoever sings down Anthropic may be disappointed
Author: Alan Walker, Silicon Valley Original title: Is Anthropic's Growth Slowing Down? Source of controversy. Claude Code ARR tracking chart produced by TickerTrends. The latest data is $15.12 billion for the week of August 10, 2026, accounting for 21.9% of Anthropic's total ARR. Please note: This is an estimate from a third party agency and is not an official disclosure of Anthropic. The first section below explains how important this difference is. Alan Walker from Silicon Valley made an appointment for dinner in Hong Kong. After some hard work, he discovered that this picture had been retweeted more than 30 times, and the matching statement was similar — “Anthropic's growth has leveled off; 2 trillion dollars is a bubble.” Alan saved the image, zoomed it in, and looked at it again. The problem isn't in this picture. This picture is very well done, and the data is probably done seriously. The problem is that almost everyone who retweeted it was using it to answer a question it couldn't answer at all. 01 Let's first figure out who made this picture, there is a Claude icon in the upper left corner. The color scheme is Claude's familiar orange. At first glance, it looks like an official product. It's not. The author of this picture is TickerTrends and has his name written in the upper right corner. It is a third-party data tracking agency that uses various external signals (application data, payment panels, recruitment, channel caliber, etc.) to estimate the revenue of an unlisted company. The line in the picture is written very honestly: “tracked allocation” -- the percentage of allocations that have been tracked. Let's be clear: Anthropic has never publicly disclosed Claude Code's individual ARR numbers, not once. Every point on this curve has been estimated by an outsider. For example, this is like someone using “long queues at the entrance of a restaurant every day” to estimate its turnover and then draw a beautiful weekly curve. The length of the team does correlate with turnover, but in the middle there is turnover rate, customer unit price, takeout ratio, private room business — you see that the team is three short weeks, and the kitchen is probably being renovated in those three weeks. What is more important is the caliber itself. ARR's algorithm is “revenue for the most recent period times 12.” Enterprise software contracts are not executed evenly every day; they are signed batch by batch. Big orders signed at the end of a quarter will jump a week's curve by a large margin; if the next quarter's big orders aren't signed, the curve will go sideways. Weekly ARR tracking is extremely insensitive to this kind of blocky landing—it will paint the “pace of signing” as a “change in demand.” In a nutshell, what you have in your hand is an unofficial weekly map estimated by an outsider, with a very blunt caliber. Judging by the weight of the “bubble” under it is tantamount to using body temperature to measure blood pressure. 02 I hit myself in the face on this picture. I haven't seen anyone mention it, but it's the most interesting part of the whole thing. The picture shows two numbers: Claude Code is $15.12 billion, or 21.9% of Anthropic's total ARR. By dividing: calculate 15.12 billion ÷ 21.9% = about $69 billion. This is Anthropic's total ARR for the week ending August 10, implied by this image. The official caliber figures reported by Bloomberg, Reuters, and CNBC on August 17 were — $65 billion at the end of July. Clear: This chart, which is being used to prove “slowing growth,” its own implied total number of companies is 4 billion US dollars higher than the official figure ten days ago. Further 10 days until today, if the trend continues, more than 70 billion is a reasonable estimate (this sentence is an inference, not data). In one sentence, people who retweeted only read the number 151.2 and the height of the column, skipping the 21.9% next to it. And that 21.9% said: This company went a step further when everyone shouted “it's slowing down.” I only believe in the two numbers on the same picture that is beneficial to my opinion; this is not called analysis. 03 You are looking at the picture below. The money in the picture above has the upper and lower two pieces. Above is the absolute amount (how many billion dollars), and below is the percentage change (how much more than a percent increase from four weeks ago). The vast majority of people's reasoning is: below...
