Last year, a lot of people (including me) were wondering if the AI industry was in a bubble. These days it’s looking a lot less likely. The technology has found its killer app — agentic coding, which has upended the software industry as we know it. For power users, AI is no longer just a chatbot — you can tell it to go make you an app, or run some data analysis, and it’ll just do it for you and come back with the results.
This is making a LOT of money. As I predicted, Anthropic has been quicker to capitalize on the agentic coding boom than OpenAI. Anthropic focused on selling to businesses, while OpenAI focused on building its brand and selling to consumers; the revenue from agentic coding is almost all in the former category. So as Ruben Dominguez reports, Anthropic has probably overtaken OpenAI in revenue, or will do so soon:
In case you don’t realize how much money this is, or how fast this growth rate is, here’s some perspective:
Some of that will be eaten up by computing costs, of course. But as the WSJ recently reported, Anthropic’s computing costs are much lower than OpenAI’s. As a result, it’s expected to start turning a profit faster than OpenAI — and even OpenAI’s projections depend heavily on a comeback push that eats into Anthropic’s enterprise market share.
The rise of coding agents isn’t just changing the corporate horse race; it’s changing the whole picture of how we think about competition and profit in the world’s most important new industry. In a post last December, I wondered if AI would end up being a vitally important but low-margin business, similar to solar power or airlines:
