Anthropic: Claude crushes giants
It’s been quite a start to the year for the San Francisco-based AI lab Anthropic, which had been lurking in the shadows cast by OpenAI, Google and Meta, but the release of a new version of its Claude model along with a series of plug-in tools for specific industries has put it very much in the spotlight.
The market took the view that Anthropic’s advances meant traditional software developers had about as much of a future as a French aristocrat in the early 1790s, and promptly wiped about $400bn off the market capitalisation of the likes of Microsoft and Oracle.
Anthropic’s valuation is flying in the opposite direction, aiming to raise an estimated $35bn at a valuation of $350bn and licking its lips at the prospect of a mighty IPO later this year. Cash is pouring through the door, with annualised revenues coming in at about $9bn at the end of 2025, up from $1bn the previous year, and it is telling delighted investors to expect $30bn this year and then to keep on climbing.
The white-collar roles that could be affected by Anthropic’s AI include sales, finance, legal, marketing and customer support, and it has been working for six months with Goldman Sachs to develop autonomous systems for time-intensive, high-volume back-office work.
Goldman’s CIO Marco Argenti has expressed surprise at how capable Claude has proved in areas beyond coding, particularly in accounting and compliance, and while he is sticking to the line that it is premature to expect job losses, it may be time to update the CV.
Stellantis: Revolution in reverse
Carmakers that tooled up in response to the zero-emissions enthusiasm of former president Joe Biden’s time in office must have needed a stiff drink when they saw Donald Trump return to the White House.
With a loud chorus of “drill, baby, drill”, the Trump administration has confirmed its allegiance to life, liberty and enormous gas-guzzlers, withdrawing a $7,500 consumer tax credit for EVs and investigating ways to slash regulations to curb emissions. Combined with the reluctance of MAGA cap-wearers to be seen dead in anything with a whiff of Scandinavia about it, the reckoning has been brutal.
Stellantis, the European carmaker that owns brands such as Peugeot, Fiat, Jeep and Citroën, was one of the most enthusiastic adopters of the EV revolution, setting a goal under its former CEO Carlos Tavares that all its European car sales and 50% of its US sales would be electric by 2030.
That strategy has gone rapidly into reverse, and Stellantis has admitted that it lost touch with the real-world needs of its customers as the company announced a €22bn charge to get back to producing cars that people actually want to buy.
This comes hot on the heels of a $19.5bn hit for Ford and $7bn for GM in the bonfire of the hybrids, with Stellantis announcing the return of crowd-pleasers such as the 5.7l “Hemi” V8 engine in the Ram 1500 pick-up truck.
Stellantis’s charge was bigger than investors had expected, and combined with a gloomy fourth-quarter forecast, it saw the company’s share price fall by 25% in a day. It will take a while to convince investors of any turnaround.