Anthropic’s IPO dreams may be eclipsed by the cloud

CALL it the nerd mindset. Silicon Valley has spent the last few years believing that whoever built the smartest artificial-intelligence (AI) system would rule the industry. Today, that calculation is starting to look misguided.

The cost of building AI models is going up, and the price of using them is going down. AI companies’ revenue growth has been impressive, but it’s also slowing. That doesn’t necessarily mean a bursting bubble, but it does look like the real power increasingly lies with the companies that distribute and power the technology: cloud giants like Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon.

This trio of the Big Tech establishment, whose shares have risen an average of 10 per cent since the start of 2026, controls the infrastructure, customer relationships and distribution channels through which AI is sold. They can profit whether a business uses Claude, or an older version of ChatGPT, or a cheaper open-weight model from China. That’s not the case for OpenAI or Anthropic.