Seventeen billion dollars in quarterly revenue. Let me say that again – $17 billion. In three months. And apparently, that’s not good enough.

Anthropic dropped their Q3 numbers this week, and instead of champagne popping, we got a collective groan from the AI skeptic crowd. The company pulled in $16.8 billion last quarter, which is objectively a massive number, but here’s the thing – it’s growing slower than before. And in the overheated world of AI hype, slowing growth is basically the kiss of death.

When Good News Becomes Bad News

Market researcher Geiger Capital posted a chart of Anthropic’s revenue run-rate on X with possibly the most dramatic caption of the week: “Not good enough. It’s over.” Over. As in, pack it up, shut it down, the party’s finished.

Now, I’ve covered a lot of tech stories over the years, and this reaction is… something. We’re talking about a company that just made nearly $17 billion in a quarter getting eulogized because the growth rate isn’t quite as insane as it was a few months ago. The revenue jumped significantly from Q2, sure, but not as much as it jumped from Q1 to Q2. Basically, they’re still growing fast – just not exponentially fast anymore.

And the AI doomers are having an absolute field day with this.

The Skeptics Circle the Wagons

Gary Marcus, who’s made a second career out of being skeptical about AI (and look, sometimes he’s got a point), dug up an old revenue forecast and basically said “lol, not even close.” He’s been one of the most vocal critics of what he sees as AI market madness, and these numbers are giving him ammunition.

What’s interesting here is the defense that came back. One user argued that Anthropic’s slower Q3 growth was because of “the death of tokenmaxxing” and rising competition from Chinese open source models. Which is a fancy way of saying: people stopped just burning through API calls for the hell of it, and there’s cheaper alternatives now.

Then Andrew Yang jumped in – yeah, that Andrew Yang, former presidential candidate turned tech commentator – to talk about what this means for the broader market. He pointed out that a ~45% quarterly revenue growth rate is going to be “seen as disappointing” and will “put massive pressure on the AI hypergrowth narrative.”

Wait, Did He Just Say 45% Growth Is Disappointing?

Let that sink in for a second. Forty-five percent quarterly growth. Most companies would kill for that kind of number. But in AI land, where we’ve been conditioned to expect miracles every quarter, it’s apparently a letdown.

This is the problem with hype cycles, right? Once you set expectations at “we’re going to grow infinitely forever,” anything less than that looks like failure. Even when you’re literally making billions of dollars.

“Anthropic’s quarterly revenue growth rate of ~45% is going to be seen as disappointing, and will put massive pressure on the AI hypergrowth narrative.”

What’s Actually Happening Here

Here’s my take, and I’m probably going to annoy both the AI boosters and the doomers with this: Anthropic is growing really, really fast. They’re making absurd amounts of money. But they’re also hitting the reality that no company can maintain triple-digit growth rates forever. It’s literally impossible.

The “death of tokenmaxxing” thing is real – early adopters were experimenting, throwing everything at the wall to see what stuck, burning through API credits like there was no tomorrow. Now they’re being more strategic. That’s not a crisis, that’s maturity. The 200-Job Gamble: Why AI Applications Backfire shows what happens when that strategic approach never arrives.

And yeah, Chinese open source models are applying competitive pressure. That’s called a market. It happens. Doesn’t mean Anthropic is doomed, it means they have to actually compete now instead of just riding the wave of AI mania.

The IPO pressure is the real story here, though. Anthropic is supposedly gearing up for a historic public offering, and Wall Street doesn’t care about your $17 billion quarter if the trajectory isn’t pointing straight up forever. Investors want to believe they’re getting in on the ground floor of infinite growth, and anything that suggests there might be, you know, limits… that’s scary.

The Bigger Picture Nobody Wants to Talk About

What kills me about this whole situation is how binary the reactions are. Either AI is going to save/destroy the world and grow forever, or it’s all a scam and everyone’s going to lose their shirts. There’s no middle ground where AI is a genuinely useful technology that will find its actual market size, grow at reasonable rates, and become a normal part of the tech landscape.

But that’s not exciting enough, I guess. That doesn’t get the clicks or the hot takes on X.

The truth is probably somewhere boring: Anthropic is a successful company with a valuable product facing normal competitive pressures and market maturation. They’ll probably have a solid IPO, make a bunch of people rich, and continue growing – just not at the pace that makes people lose their minds. Ben Affleck: Why 'Digger' Bomb Will Kill Cinema explores similar questions about hype cycles destroying entire industries.

But we’ll see. Maybe the doomers are right and this is the beginning of the end. Or maybe a company making $17 billion a quarter is actually doing just fine, and we all need to calm down a bit. I’m leaning toward the latter, but hey, I’ve been wrong before.