Anthropic just posted more than $11 billion in second‑quarter revenue — a number so large it dwarfs the moral imagination. It’s the kind of figure that once belonged to oil giants or defense contractors, not a company whose main product is an AI assistant called Claude, the company’s chatbot, which is now the chief rival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT
Anthropic’s investors are expected to take the company public this October at a price that’s about 43 times its current yearly revenue of $47 billion. If that holds, the company would debut at around $2 trillion — the biggest IPO ever recorded.
Wall Street calls it “hypergrowth.” Investors call it “historic.” Washington calls it “innovation.” WebProNews calls Anthropic’s $11.5B quarter “stunning” and “a pivotal shift” for AI, emphasizing:
“AI’s arrival as big business”
“Anthropic has done what few artificial intelligence companies manage. It turned a profit.”
“The actual quarterly results now match the hype.”
I call it obscene.
Meanwhile, the system that produced these superprofits is experiencing a very different kind of historic growth: child poverty doubled after Congress let the expanded Child Tax Credit expire. Food insecurity among families with children is at its highest level in modern record‑keeping. Homelessness — especially among families — rose 12 percent, the largest jump since the federal government began tracking it.
These two stories are not separate. They are the same story told from opposite ends of the American economy. Rather than focusing on this incredible and untenable wealth gap being generated by AI behemoths like Anthropic, corporate media, along with the leadership of both political parties, have turned their guns on the left and, more precisely, on democratic socialism and the DSA.
Of course, Republican Red Scare politics is nothing new. It’s the great diversion strategy used in the face of the gross and growing social and economic inequities driving recent progressive electoral victories. In modern Democratic politics, you probably can trace it back to the Obama White House in 2010 when press secretary Robert Gibbs called for targeting the “professional left.”
Gibbs blasted progressive activists who criticized the party leadership from the left. Gibbs said they would “be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare, and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon,” and that they “wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.”
He was probably right about that.
He later apologized, but the remark was widely seen as revealing a deeper tension between the Obama White House and progressive organizations, setting the stage for the current divide between the party’s centrists and progressives.
Anthropic is currently under investigation and being sued — including by authors like me — for allegedly stealing copyrighted books to train its models. The company that just posted $11 billion in quarterly revenue is accused of building its empire on uncompensated creative labor, scraped without permission, credit, or payment. The profits aren’t just obscene because of their scale. They’re obscene because they were achieved while thousands of writers are in court fighting to prove their work was stolen. (Of note, the current class action lawsuit by thousands of authors against Anthropic will constitute among the largest class action lawsuits ever, and certainly the largest intellectual property suit yet).
Anthropic’s profits are not a sign of national health. They are a symptom of national neglect. We have the capacity to lift millions of children out of poverty — we proved it in 2021 when Congress temporarily expanded the Child Tax Credit; child poverty in the United States fell to the lowest level ever recorded — and then doubled the moment Congress let it expire.
Every new red‑scare editorial is an attempt to distract from the simple truth: democratic socialists didn’t create this crisis — they’re the ones most loudly willing to name it.
Postscript: If there’s one thing positive I can say about Anthropic, it’s this: the company and its CEO, Dario Amodei, managed to irritate the Trump administration by refusing to loosen Claude’s restrictions for Pentagon use. Anthropic’s terms bar domestic surveillance, which means Claude can’t be quietly piped into ICE or the FBI.
The friction didn’t last long. Washington rarely stays mad at a firm posting $11 billion quarters. My hunch is that Trump and Amodei will find a way to get along
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