Venture capital predicts Anthropic's revenue will surpass Alphabet by 2028: "Selling brains rather than tools," targeting a $50 trillion labor market

According to Beating Monitoring, OSS Capital’s founding partner Joseph Jacks predicts that Anthropic’s annualized revenue will surpass Google’s parent company Alphabet by mid-2028. His growth curve is extremely steep: $100 billion by the end of this year, $340 billion next year, and then straight to $850 billion the year after that. Jacks says this is already a “conservatively lowered” forecast.

In the first four months of this year, Anthropic’s revenue has already tripled 3.3 times (to $300 billion). In the previous quarter, Gemini’s usage only grew by 60%, while Anthropic exploded by 10 times. He points out that this kind of surge has three hard supports:

• Major customers find it extremely difficult to unsubscribe: the number of enterprises with annual fees of more than $1 million doubles to 1,000 within two months. Once a business connects to an Agent, the switching cost is extremely high.
• Penetrate big corporations with a single product: Claude Code became the knock-in door, and in turn packaged the underlying capabilities into the Fortune 2000.
• Compute power is no longer the bottleneck: with help from Google’s existing capacity, as well as recent large deals with Broadcom and SpaceX, compute power has finally caught up with demand.

In response to doubts that “once scale breaks 100 billion, it must inevitably slow down,” Jacks believes this is using old rules to judge a new phenomenon. AWS and Meta sell “tools,” and the ceiling is the $800 billion software market; Anthropic sells “brainpower,” benchmarking against the $50 trillion global labor market. The market is two orders of magnitude larger, so the old slowdown rules naturally no longer hold.

Note: There is recent controversy around the “$30 billion revenue” baseline for this forecast. OpenAI executives previously questioned whether Anthropic used gross revenue when calculating the distribution of cloud vendors, which could mean its scale is overestimated; and using a startup’s “annualized expectations” to compare with a public company’s “financial report revenue” involves standards that are not comparable.