(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Call it the nerd mindset. Silicon Valley has spent the last few years believing that whoever built the smartest artificial-intelligence 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 Corp., Alphabet Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.
This trio of the Big Tech establishment, whose shares have risen an average of 10% 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.
The latter is on the runway to an initial public offering in November; it’s aiming for a $2 trillion valuation in what will be the biggest test of continued investor appetite for the AI boom. The problem: Anthropic recently told investors that its third-quarter revenue was $16.8 billion, a quarter-on-quarter growth rate of around 50%, compared with 140% earlier this year.
Go on X and you’ll find hysteria over this news. A popular financial commenter calls Anthropic’s numbers a “crazy sharp” deceleration. “It’s over,” they add, ominously.