When Anthropic launched plug-ins targeting noncoders for sales, finance, marketing, and legal services, $300 billion evaporated from the market value of software companies. Each new product release from the AI lab now sends shockwaves through Wall Street, as investors recalculate which entire job categories the technology might render obsolete.
"Hvylya" reports, citing a TIME investigation, that Anthropic's growth trajectory has few precedents in the software industry. Annualized revenue from Claude Code alone topped $1 billion by the end of 2025. By February 2026, that figure had more than doubled to $2.5 billion, putting Anthropic on track to surpass OpenAI's revenue by the end of 2026, according to estimates from industry monitors Epoch and Semianalysis.
The engine behind the surge is Claude Code, a tool created by engineer Boris Cherny that gives Claude the ability to write and execute code the way any programmer might. When a research preview was publicly released in February 2025, programmers flocked to it. Its creator eventually stopped writing his own code entirely.
Anthropic's $380 billion valuation now eclipses those of Goldman Sachs, McDonald's, and Coca-Cola. The company had just raised $30 billion from investors ahead of a possible IPO. Nvidia, the chipmaking giant, invested $10 billion - even as its CEO Jensen Huang said he "pretty much disagree[s] with almost everything" Dario Amodei says about AI, while calling Claude an "incredible" model.
The market reaction to Anthropic's releases reflects a growing consensus: the advances will upend entire categories, from law to software development. Over the past few months, Anthropic emerged as the company most poised to disrupt the future of work - a distinction its own employees view with ambivalence, given the company's stated concern about mass displacement of white-collar jobs.
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