Why Does 80% of Anthropic's Revenue Come From New Models?

Joey Brookhart says 80% of Anthropic's revenue in the last three months came from models released in the last six months. The other 20% is earlier models, including Opus 4.5 and the versions before it. Buyers keep moving to whatever shipped recently, so a frontier lab that falls behind loses the revenue that just arrived.

Nilay Patel asks why the profitable move is not to stop training and sell one model into more industries. In cyber, a defender needs a frontier model when an adversary is using one. An email summary can run on an open-source model or on Sonnet. In a lawsuit, a defendant would not want a lawyer on a non-frontier model if the other side had a frontier model. Legal services, medicine, and other fields where AI has barely spread can spend heavily, and that spend is not only about who has the single newest model. Where two sides compete, the newer model still decides the purchase. Open source has been catching up, which keeps the same pressure on the next release.

Anthropic is also getting more vertical. Job postings show it, along with Claude for financial services, Claude for legal, and a cyber program that gives away $25,000 of credits a month. Those are the areas expected to matter in 2027. Work like email summary still does not need a frontier model.