Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Friday, 29th May 2026

The most interesting thing about Anthropic's $65B Series H announcement is this line (emphasis mine):

Since our Series G in February, adoption has continued to grow across global enterprise customers, and our run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion earlier this month.

Anthropic have made a bit of a habit of sharing their "run-rate revenue" in this kind of announcement, which is an annualized projection of their current revenue - typically calculated by taking the most recent month and multiplying by 12.

Earlier this year:

I had Claude Opus 4.8 make me this chart using Matplotlib (Claude: "a data line chart is more straightforward matplotlib work—not really a design piece"):

Line chart titled "Run-rate revenue" with y-axis "Run-rate revenue ($bn)" from $0bn to $50bn, showing four data points rising sharply: Dec 31 2025 $9bn, Feb 12 2026 $14bn, Apr 1 2026 $30bn, May 7 2026 $47bn.

Back in April Axios CEO Jim VandeHei wrote that he could not find "any company — in any industry, in any era — that has scaled organic revenue this quickly at this level as Anthropic" - and that was when they were at a paltry $30 billion.

(Also in Axios today is an anonymously sourced note that "An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees" - times that by 12 and you get an extra $6 billion in annualized run-rate!)

Ed Zitron was extremely skeptical of that $30 billion number - I wonder if his skepticism will update for the new $47 billion figure.

I've seen a few people dismiss this as untrustworthy, because the numbers come from Anthropic. That doesn't hold up: these numbers were included in announcements of their fundraises, and lying to investors who just put in $65 billion would be securities fraud. They're even less likely to lie given that the real numbers will no doubt come out in their S-1 when they file for their IPO.

# 1:23 am / ai, anthropic

Another significant alpha release, with two new headline features.

Datasette now offers users with the necessary permissions the ability to both execute write queries against their database and to save stored queries (renamed from "canned queries") both privately and for use by other members of their Datasette instance.

There's more detail in SQL write queries and stored queries in Datasette 1.0a31 on the Datasette blog, which now has three posts introducing new features since the blog launched two weeks ago.

Here's an animated demo from the blog post showing how the new execute query interface lets people get started with templated insert/update/delete queries from tables they have permission to edit:

The user starts on the data database page, selects actions and "Execute write SQL", then selects the insert document template on the next page and executes it with a title of "My document!". Also demonstrates that a create table statement cannot be executed because the user does not have create-table permission.

Thursday, 28th May 2026