PUBLISHED: Thu, Feb 5, 2026, 6:23 PM UTC | UPDATED: Thu, Feb 5, 2026, 8:19 PM UTC
8 mins read
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Anthropic's Claude Code crossed $1 billion in revenue in November 2025, with word-of-mouth exposure spiking 13 percentage points between late December and January according to Caliber data
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The company is launching Opus 4.6 with improved reasoning for complex agentic tasks, as it reportedly negotiates to double its funding round to $20 billion at a $350 billion valuation
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Developers cite Opus 4.5's breakthrough performance as a paradigm shift - completing multistep tasks over days without handholding, driving mass migration from competing tools
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But security researchers flag concerns about subtle bugs in complex code, while open-source alternatives and OpenAI's new Codex app threaten to erode Claude's gains
Anthropic is riding an unprecedented wave. Between December and January, the company's Claude Code exploded across developer communities, hitting $1 billion in revenue and sparking talk that OpenAI's grip on AI might be slipping. Now, with the launch of Opus 4.6, Anthropic faces its biggest test yet - can it hold onto the momentum, or will this be just another fleeting hype cycle in the brutal AI arms race?
Boris Cherny is getting stopped for selfies. The creator and head of Claude Code finds himself recognized at bars, airports, and basically anywhere he goes these days. It's a strange new reality for an engineer - but it reflects just how fast Anthropic has captured the developer zeitgeist.
The numbers tell the story. Between December 29th and January 26th, Anthropic's word-of-mouth exposure jumped 13 percentage points compared to the prior month, while OpenAI's actually declined slightly, according to data from Caliber, a stakeholder intelligence platform. By November 2025, Claude Code had already crossed $1 billion in revenue. Now the company is reportedly in talks to double its latest funding round to $20 billion - at a staggering $350 billion valuation - due to surging investor demand.
The holiday break became an unexpected inflection point. Developers with time on their hands built everything from MRI viewing tools to Goodreads alternatives to elaborate AI-judged T-shirt design contests. Posts on X proclaimed an "irreversible trend" of Anthropic "taking the lead" from OpenAI, with some wondering if this meant "the fall of" the ChatGPT maker.
"I think we'll remember December 2025 as this inflection point where all of a sudden everything changed," Mike Brevoort, principal architect at warehouse automation startup Mytra, told . After testing Claude Code over the holidays to build a prototype, he had what he called a "water in the face" moment. "Claude is becoming the verb now, or the noun, in the similar way that ChatGPT was as it launched."
While developers binged on Claude Code, Cherny was on a houseboat in Copenhagen doing something even more meta - using Claude Code to build itself. With more than five Claude agents running in the cloud, he shipped over 300 pull requests in December, his most productive month at Anthropic in his year-and-a-half there. Since November, Cherny has used Claude Code to write 100 percent of his code, a 10x jump from a year ago. Across other Anthropic teams, Claude Code now writes between 70 to 90 percent of code, with about 90 percent of Claude Code's own codebase written by the tool itself.
Now Anthropic is releasing Opus 4.6, calling it a "direct upgrade" with improved speed and precision for agentic work spanning coding to Excel and PowerPoint automation. Dianne Na Penn, Anthropic's head of research product management, told The Verge that Opus 4.6 can "think" longer about more complex questions - an evolution from past models.
The surge didn't come out of nowhere. Anthropic told The Verge it's seen an eightfold increase in business customers representing more than $1 million in revenue run rate over the past year. The company swept Scale AI's "Model of the Year" awards, winning more categories than any competitor, including "best agentic model."
But the real catalyst was Opus 4.5, released days before Thanksgiving. "It went from, 'Oh, I kind of have to sit there and watch it and handhold it and really closely check it,' to 'Oh, it's going to succeed by default,'" Josh Albrecht, CTO of Imbue AI, said. He was making so much progress he never even bothered trying OpenAI's competing Codex over the holidays. Imbue has since overhauled its process to give small teams of one or two engineers nearly unlimited Claude Code credits.
"I think Opus 4.5 just gets it - I find that I have to describe my intent a lot less," Allie K. Miller, CEO of enterprise AI advisory firm Open Machine, said. "Pre-Opus 4.5, you kind of had to take apart the Lego set and just go step by step. Now you're just like, 'Here's the magic castle. Build it.' And it gets done."
The enthusiasm spans industries. At education startup Amira Learning, the entire team prefers Claude Code. At Incredible Health, an AI-powered healthcare career platform, the majority of AI-written code comes from Claude, according to CEO and cofounder Iman Abuzeid. Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Andrew B. Hall is running experiments to see how well Claude Code can update old research papers.
For Siqi Chen, CEO and CFO of finance analytics firm Runway, the product passed a "critical threshold" - completing even complex, multistep tasks over days. "The difference is going from having a conversation to actually having agents do incredibly productive, useful work," he said.
The Claude Code surge reflects broader gains in AI agents, tools that can complete complex, multistep tasks without checking in at each step. AI companies have promised agents are ready for primetime every year, and every year they've failed to fully deliver - but something shifted these past few months, especially in coding.
"Claude has emerged as a very clear example of what an autonomous long-running agent will look like, starting first with coding, but very clearly you can see the extension into other forms of knowledge work," Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, told The Verge. He said Anthropic is in a great position due to Opus 4.5's success in tool use, reasoning, and complex data analysis.
An Anthropic holiday promotion that doubled rate limits helped draw in casual users with extra time over the break. "For people who don't do this stuff every day, going from that to, 'Oh shit, this is really impressive' - that, I think, helped a lot," Austin Parker, director of open source at Honeycomb, said.
Claude Code's stickiness could give Anthropic an edge. The platform was one of the first AI coding services to offer a file with basic operating systems and instructions users can tweak over time - one source The Verge spoke with now has 1,000 such instructions, which would be frustrating to move elsewhere.
"Users are loyal to the tools that they trust, the tools that they've seen success with," Steve Croce, field CTO at Anaconda, a Python platform for AI and data science, said. His company's own engineering team uses Claude Code most of the time. "At this point, they're not going to change unless something drastic happens. They found a workflow they like, and it's working well for them."
But Anthropic faces serious obstacles. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seemed to shade Anthropic at a press briefing last week, saying other tools besides Codex might need "more handholding" and that "if you really want to do sophisticated work on something complex, 5.2 is the strongest model by far." This week, OpenAI launched its new standalone Codex app for Apple computers to grab more AI coding market share.
Security is another concern. Joe Tyler, an AI researcher at Sonar, a trust and verification platform for AI coding, said Sonar's research found Opus 4.5 was better than competitors at being concise and easy to understand. But OpenAI's GPT-5.2 was the most secure model according to Sonar's benchmarks, with less than half as many "blocker-level vulnerabilities" - things that could spark large-impact security incidents - as Opus 4.5.
"Specific types of bugs have gotten worse in Opus," Tyler said. "Because it's trying to do more complex things, then it does also become susceptible to these more subtle types of bugs that are quite hard to track." Anthropic's Penn said the company took that feedback into account and invested "in more cybersecurity monitoring and evals for Opus 4.6."
Multiple developers said they're eyeing open-source alternatives like OpenHands and OpenCode for pricing reasons. And public trust is fragile. Caliber's data showed Anthropic's trust and likability score has dropped 11 percentage points since September 2025, with OpenAI's dropping 16 percentage points. Usually, the more brand recognition an AI company has, the lower the public trust score.
But Anthropic may have an unexpected advantage - it's avoided controversy. ChatGPT users across Reddit have been canceling subscriptions en masse, some due to performance issues, some due to OpenAI president Greg Brockman's millions in donations to a pro-Trump super PAC. Some are highlighting Claude as an alternative.
"ChatGPT stopped being cool a little while ago," Anaconda's Croce said. "There was just a lot of distracting noise coming from OpenAI. Anthropic doesn't make a lot of unnecessary noise for themselves."
The company has kept a tight focus on text-based AI productivity tools for enterprise users, rather than courting controversy with tools like OpenAI's Sora video generator or xAI's Grok chatbot. "I don't have to worry about Claude calling itself 'MechaHitler,' I don't have to worry about Claude doing weird image-gen stuff," Honeycomb's Parker said, referring to Elon Musk's Grok controversies. "We don't want to be in the situation where a model provider is exposing us to brand risk as well."
Penn said Opus 4.6 maintains the company's "same overall direction and vision, which is that we think Claude can be really helpful for work." Whether that's enough to hold off the competition remains to be seen.
Anthropic is at a crossroads. The company has captured lightning in a bottle with Claude Code's viral holiday moment, crossing $1 billion in revenue and sparking genuine excitement among developers tired of OpenAI's drama. But hype cycles are brutal and fleeting in AI. With Opus 4.6, Anthropic needs to prove it can maintain technical superiority while OpenAI fights back with its new Codex app and open-source alternatives chip away at pricing. The next few months will determine whether this was Claude's breakout moment or just another blip in the endless AI model wars. For now, developers seem convinced - and they're betting their workflows on it.
