Anthropic's Revenue Hits $65B Run Rate — While Amazon Burns Rare Books for AI
Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate passed $65 billion by the end of July. Bloomberg reported it, and TechCrunch picked it up on August 17. The trajectory: $9 billion at the end of last year, $47 billion in May, $65 billion in two months.
The Financial Times says investors expect Anthropic to close 2026 somewhere between $100 billion and $120 billion if growth holds. OpenAI, by comparison, doubled its run rate to $40 billion from $20 billion at the end of 2025 — a slower curve that has investors paying more attention to Anthropic.
Both companies have filed confidentially for IPOs. Anthropic could list this fall, reportedly seeking a valuation of $2 trillion or more. That would be the largest market debut on record.
Meanwhile: Amazon Is Destroying Rare Books to Feed Its Models
The same week, a different kind of AI economics story broke. A bookseller hid an AirTag inside a rare book from a bulk order, 404 Media reported. The tracking led to an Amazon AI training facility in Las Vegas, where a warehouse team called VGT3 tears books from their spines and scans the pages.
The targets are bulk-purchased rare and older works — often never-translated or never-widely-distributed titles with little monetary value but unique content. Booksellers believe AI firms target specific ISBNs to systematically scan works that exist nowhere else.
The warehouse door reportedly features a logo of a Tyrannosaurus rex preparing to devour a book. Amazon’s response didn’t mention AI training: “Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use.”
One industry printing $65 billion annualized. One industry shredding the last copies of rare books so models can read what nobody else can. Same week, same gold rush.