Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says company crew 80-fold in first quarter
Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive officer of Anthropic, at the AI Impact Summit on Thursday, February 19, 2026, in New Delhi, India.
Prakash Singh | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said his company is trying to plan for 10x growth. But on an annual basis, revenue and usage increased 80-fold in the first quarter, which he says explains why it’s been so difficult to meet demand.
“This is why we’re having difficulty with the PC,” Amodei said Wednesday at his company’s developer conference in San Francisco. Amodei added that the company is “working as quickly as possible to deliver more capacity” and will “get this calculation to you as soon as possible.”
Amodei’s comments came hours after Anthropic announced A deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to use all the computing capacity at his company’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee. As part of the agreement, Anthropic will gain access to more than 300 megawatts of capacity. SpaceX owns rival artificial intelligence lab xAI, now known as SpaceXAI.
Anthropic’s historic growth has been driven by the popularity of Claude AI models and has experienced a notable boom since the release last year of Claude Code, which took the software development world by storm. The company is currently in talks with investors about raising cash at a $900 billion valuation, which would be more valuable than OpenAI, as CNBC previously reported.
“Software engineers are the fastest adopters of new technology,” Amodei said on stage. “This is a harbinger of how things will work in the economy and how the economy will be transformed by artificial intelligence.”
Last month, Anthropic said that demand for Claude had led to “inevitable strain on our infrastructure”, affecting “reliability and performance” for its users, especially during peak hours. The company has signed several computing deals in recent weeks, including a multibillion-dollar deal with Amazon.
Anthropic, meanwhile, maintains a contentious relationship with the U.S. government and the Pentagon, which declared the company a supply chain risk in March and blacklisted its work with the military. As this conflict continues in the legal system, Anthropic becomes increasingly popular.
Amodei said the current level of growth was “crazy” and “very difficult to handle,” telling viewers he hoped for “more normal” expansion.
—CNBC’s Ashley Capoot contributed to this report.
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