Anthropic Revenue Hits $4 Billion Annual Pace as Competition With Cursor Intensifies
Anysphere, the maker of Cursor, an artificial intelligence-powered coding app, has hired two leaders of Anthropic’s competing coding product, Claude Code, according to one of the leaders.
The move is notable because Cursor relies on AI from Anthropic to power its app and is one of Anthropic’s biggest customers.
The hiring underscores the frenetic nature of talent moves in the AI field this year. It also comes as Anthropic’s revenue is accelerating as businesses pay to access its Claude AI models. It reached a pace of $4 billion annually, or $333 million per month, up almost four times from the start of the year, according to people familiar with the finances.
The Takeaway
• Anthropic revenue has risen to $4 billion annualized• Anysphere, startup behind Cursor, hires two leaders of Anthropic’s coding assistant• Hiring could complicate relationship between Anthropic, Anysphere
Boris Cherny, who led the development of Claude Code, will join Anysphere as chief architect and head of engineering, starting this week, Cherny said. Cat Wu, the product manager for Claude Code at Anthropic, is joining as the head of product at Anysphere, he said.
Anthropic launched Claude Code in February as a standalone coding product powered by its models. Reflecting the popularity of assistants like Cursor, Amazon’s AWS and OpenAI have also launched their own coding products.
At Cursor, the two hires will work on developing “agent-like” features, which refers to automating complex coding tasks involving multiple steps, and other products, Cherny said.
Anthropic, now valued at $61.5 billion, has developed what many software engineers consider to be the best AI for generating or fixing computer code, and it even beat out OpenAI in this regard, according to OpenAI’s internal evaluations last year. That led Cursor to rely more on Anthropic models to power its app, which is known as an internal development environment that helps engineers debug code or ask questions about their codebase.
Cursor’s growth is also accelerating thanks to advances in Anthropic’s models and what developers say is an easy-to-use interface. The company said last month that it has surpassed $500 million in annual recurring revenue, or $42 million in revenue per month. That’s more than double its pace of $200 million in annual recurring revenue as of March. Anysphere’s valuation is $9.9 billion, up from $2.6 billion in December.
Both companies are grappling with the high costs of running AI software. Anthropic expects to burn $3 billion in cash this year after burning $5.6 billion last year.