Anthropic is experiencing significant turbulence at a pivotal moment, with a series of converging challenges ahead of a potential IPO that could value the company near $800 billion. The AI darling's revenue has tripled to $30 billion this year, fueled by its popular coding tools. Yet the company has never been more valuable or more vulnerable.
Chief rival OpenAI sees opportunity in Anthropic's recent stumbles, actively courting frustrated developers and positioning itself as the steadier alternative ahead of dueling IPOs. Anthropic's problems over the past two months span nearly every part of its business — product quality, pricing, security and capacity — and are starting to compound.
Perceived declines in Opus 4.6 performance triggered suspicion among some developers, who accused Anthropic of quietly downgrading its flagship model. Its newest model, Opus 4.7, achieved major benchmark gains but drew a mixed public reception, with some users complaining about higher token costs, bugs and uneven performance. Surging demand is also straining Anthropic's compute, leading to tighter limits and periodic outages.
These issues could undermine investor confidence as both Anthropic and OpenAI prepare for their IPOs. The capacity crunch, in particular, threatens to slow adoption of Claude among enterprise customers who require reliability at scale.
Some analysts argue the problems are typical growing pains for a hypergrowth AI company. Anthropic has historically moved quickly to address model performance complaints, suggesting the current turbulence may be temporary.