Investors see Anthropic reaching $4T after listing, but cheaper models threaten its economics.

Anthropic remains AI’s revenue leader, with annualized revenue at $65B in July, but investors are questioning how durable that lead is.

Many early investors in Anthropic expect revenue to exceed $120B by year-end, yet investors are focusing increasingly on what follows that surge as competition strengthens, customers become more price-sensitive and switching between models gets easier.

OpenAI recently overtook Anthropic in weekly spending on OpenRouter for the 1st time in more than 2.5 years after releasing GPT 5.6.

indicates how quickly customer spending can shift when model performance changes.

Price pressure is also increasing because cheaper open-weight models from companies including DeepSeek, Moonshot and Meta are approaching frontier-model performance on more workloads.

Ramp has said routing different tasks across competing models cut its AI spending by 40%, i.e. no commitment required to to 1 provider.

Anthropic still shows stronger customer retention on OpenRouter, with 22.5% of users remaining after 12 months versus about 13.2% for OpenAI.

However, investors are also weighing revenue concentration, possible US government intervention and Anthropic’s willingness to slow frontier development when safety risks increase.