Anthropic is gaining market share, not losing it – Menlo Ventures’ Matt Murphy
Anthropic (ANTRHO) is continuing to gain AI market share rather than lose it, according to data cited by Menlo Ventures partner Matt Murphy, an early Anthropic investor, as the AI giant prepares for a potential IPO as soon as next month.
Anthropic's ANTHROPIC third-quarter revenue jumped approximately 45% from the second quarter to $16.8B, Murphy said in an interview with CNBC.
Despite concerns about slowing growth in the AI sector, Murphy emphasized that Menlo Ventures' tracking data tells a different story. The firm's annual generative AI enterprise report indicates the overall AI market has accelerated to approximately 5x growth this year, up from 3.2x in 2025.
"I know there's a lot of talk about slowing, but the data doesn't suggest it," Murphy said.
Murphy addressed recent reports showing open-weight AI models capturing a growing share of token volume, with usage shifting from roughly 80% closed-weight models to 80% open-weight models over the past twelve weeks.
However, he noted that when measured by revenue rather than tokens, the picture looks quite different—and enterprise demand has rebounded strongly to frontier models.
Following Anthropic's ANTHROPIC release of Claude 3.5 Opus, the company captured over 70% of both tokens and revenue on the OpenRouter marketplace.
"Our data continues to show that Anthropic's gaining market share, not losing," Murphy said.
He explained that while companies are experimenting with open-weight models to reduce costs, most will cap their usage at about 20 to 30% of tokens because "frontier intelligence matters" for delivering quality applications.
Murphy also expressed confidence that both Anthropic and rival OpenAI OPENAI will eventually go public, describing them as "two of the biggest phenomena in the history of technology."
He noted that while OpenAI lacks the enterprise business that Anthropic has built, both companies have demonstrated extraordinary growth rates unprecedented in his 25-plus years in the industry.
"These are two monster companies. They're going to go public," Murphy said.