More Signs of a Bubble Peak: BREAKING NEWS WATCH OF THE DAY
OpenAI added a billion dollars of revenue and three billion dollars of losses in a single quarter, and now has apparently paused at least model training for reasons. When a firm best at generating vibes starts conserving cash instead, the bubble peak is likely to be close. I am surprised: Claude Code and OpenAI Codex are close enough to be a matter of taste, yet Anthropic’s revenue nearly tripled last quarter while OpenAI’s grew only (only!) 18%:
The shift from equity to debt financing of datacenters has been one powerful sign of an approaching bubble peak. Gary Marcus reads OpenAI’s pausing of some aspects as model training as a second sign: husbanding cash now appear to be more important for OpenAI than generating vibes.
As of this morning, August 18, 2026, Gary Marcus thinks that Sam Altman and OpenAI have just thrown in the towel on capturing the frontier-model lead in the next training cycle round:
Gary Marcus: BREAKING: OpenAI’s Unraveling Has Begun <https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/breaking-openais-unraveling-has-begun>: ‘Their planned IPO is facing headwinds, trust has evaporated, and their burn rate is only getting worse…. Sam Altman’s latest announcement, on Tuesday August 18 (i.e., “earlier today” for those of us on the West Coast), that OpenAI would be pausing, ostensibly for safety reasoning…. As far as I can tell, hardly anyone believed him…. Translation from the user @NIK on X: “We are out of compute”…. Slightly elaborated: Boss Hendricks: “Translation: we need to immediately stop torching cash to provide some semblance of a sustainable business model so we can rush this IPO out the door before the bubble pops”….
The Wall Street Journal’s Berber Jin and Corrie Dribusch just dropped big news: “OpenAI told investors its revenue grew by 18% from the first to the second quarter while its losses deepened… [growing] by $3 billion from q1 to q2, to $12.3 billion. Not a great look given that it added only $1 billion in revenue in the meantime, to $6.7 billion”…. Good news for Anthropic…. And terrible news for OpenAI…
We had, four months ago:
Nilay Patel: The Ai Industry’s Race for Profits Is Now Existential <https://www.theverge.com/podcast/909042/ai-monetization-cliff-anthropic-openai-profitable-ai-existential-moment>: ‘It’s a make-or-break year for Anthropic and OpenAI, which are facing more pressure than ever to make more cash than they burn…. Hayden Field… senior AI reporter here at The Verge… has been keeping close tabs on both Anthropic and OpenAI…. At some point, the profits have to materialize, or the bubble pops…. You’ve heard me ask some version of this question to scores of CEOs here on this show, and a majority of them have hinted toward the bubble popping — they think some companies will fail in spectacular fashion, some will succeed, and the opportunities, especially the money, are simply too big to ignore. We’re doing this, whether we want to or not — the market depends on it….
AI agents… have radically changed how these companies are thinking about their resources…. Agents are valuable to [code-writing] customers right now, but agents also use far more compute… burning tokens at a rate way faster than these companies anticipated…. OpenAI abruptly killed its video-generation app Sora, ditching a $1 billion Disney licensing deal in the process. Why? It costs too much to run, and OpenAI needs the compute for Codex. We saw it again just last week, when Anthropic decided it would no longer let Claude users burn through compute resources using the OpenClaw agent framework through a standard subscription plan…. The projections these companies have made, which just this week were leaked to the Wall Street Journal, tell a story of mind-boggling growth, to the tune of hundreds of billions in revenue and profitability by the end of the decade. But the most important questions now are can the AI companies pull this off, and what compromises will they make to reach that goal and avoid crashing and burning?…
Following up on his four months earlier prediction: “as nuclear as it gets: OpenAI fails [in 2026]”:
33:31
Even in this context OpenAI’s apparent training pause does surprise me. I had thought that right now OpenAI Codex on the one hand and Claude Code and Cowork on the other were about equal. Some preferred one. Some preferred the other. It seemed largely, these days, a matter of taste and path-dependency. Claude Code wins on code quality, context retention, and multi-agent orchestration; Codex wins on speed, token efficiency, cost-per-task, and fire-and-forget autonomy. Most heavy users run both. And as far as Codex and Claude Cowork are concerned, that race is just beginning, and is too close to call.
And yet it looks like OpenAI’s revenue only (only!) grew from $5.7 to $6.7 billion from the first to the second quarter, while Anthropic’s revenue grew from $4.7 to $11.5 billion. How is this, if Claude Code and Cowork and Codex are rough peers?
Well, first, they were not rough peers at the start of the quarter, on April 1. So perhaps the Q2-Q3 comparison will look very different from the Q1-Q2 comparison.
However, otherwise: The coding tool is a much bigger slice of Anthropic than of OpenAI. Roughly 80% of Anthropic’s revenue is API/enterprise. Anthropic sells agent usage metered by token through its enterprise/API tier, while Codex is delivered inside a ChatGPT Plus/Pro subscription. And OpenAI wants to build loyalty and so does not want to do what Anthropic did to its OpenClaw enthusiasts by cutting off their access. More important, perhaps: Anthropic is the picks-and-shovels supplier to the whole coding-agent ecosystem, not just Claude Code. Claude is the model behind a large share of third-party coding front-ends. with GAAP numbers due in the IPO prospectus.
What I dearly wish to see right now is Anthropic’s S-1 for its forthcoming IPO, which is coming—sometime. FutureSearch “founded in August 2023 by Dan Schwarz… [as] an AI that could predict the future” claims <https://futuresearch.ai/app/p/a/on-what-date-will-anthropic-complete-its-ipo-i> November 4 as the likely IPO date (which means the GAAP financials need to appear in less than a month and a half). Itd further claims:
Three significant overhangs threaten to push the timeline…. Gross-versus-net revenue accounting disputes are highly scrutinized by the SEC; Anthropic reportedly books cloud partnership revenue gross…. Resolving this could require extensive disclosure changes or restatements of ARR metrics. Second, ongoing litigation… over an unprecedented “supply chain risk” designation limits U.S. military contracting and requires sensitive, unresolved risk-factor disclosures . Finally, the sought-after $2T+ valuation demands a staggering $190–200B revenue forecast for 2028…
My read (which may be very wrong):
An Anthropic that comes out of the gate with a $2 trillion market valuation at its IPO is something that does not need the U.S. Defense Department as much as the U.S. Defense Department needs it. Given that standard risk disclosures are simply boilerplate, and FutureSearch is highly likely to be simply wrong here.
People who are going to buy Anthropic at the IPO can be easily directed to pro forma financials. The actual GAAP financials will be of relevance only to short sellers who are going to be on the sidelines unless they are stark raving mad given what we have seen over the past decade. FutureSearch is highly likely to be simply wrong here as well: divergence between pro forma and GAAP is also not holding up the IPO.
What is, I think, very likely to be holding up the IPO is that a number of organizations that are putting their and their clients’ money on the line here want more than just the second quarter of super-explosive growth from a relatively high base.
Recall that Anthropic’s reported revenue figures are $0.8B for 2025Q2, $4.73B for 2026Q1, and $11.5B for 2026Q2, that those come from leaks or investor-deck slides, and that that is all we know. Other leaks and announcements have been “run rates”:
$1B ARR as of the start of the 2025.
$9B ARR as of the end of 2025.
$65B ARR as of August 1, 2026.
My bet are that these are one-month run-rates at best: i.e., Anthropic booked $5.4B in revenue for the month of July 2026. People will want to see revenue on-track on an S-curve to triple from mid-2026 to moderately late-2028. That means they want to see August and September numbers, that they want those numbers to be good, and that Anthropic is willing to push off the IPO and bet that it can deliver those numbers, rather than scale back the whispered $2T IOP valuation.