It is hard to find market shares of Viaweb and Yahoo at the time of Viaweb's purchase, the best I've found is that Viaweb was bought for 1/4 of Yahoo's net revenue at the time ($49M price/$203 net revenue in 1998). Viaweb was not profitable at the time of purchase, but it had about four people and quite modest hardware costs.

While there are no companies with $1.5 trillions (4*$380B) of net revenue, the difference is that Anthropic is cash net-negative, has more than 4 people in staff (none of them are hungry artists like PG) and hardware use spendings, I think, are astronomical. They are cash net-negative because of hardware needed to train models.

There should be more than one company able to offer good purchase terms to Anthropic's owners.

I also think that Anthropic, just like OpenAI and most of other LLM companies and companies' departments, ride "test set leakage," hoping general public and investors do not understand. Their models do not generalize well, being unable to generate working code in Haskell [1] at the very least.

[1] https://haskellforall.com/2026/03/a-sufficiently-detailed-sp...

PG's Viaweb had an awful code as a liability. Anthropic's Claude Code has an awful implementation (code) and produces awful code, with more liability than code written by human.

Any company worth more could (in principle) acquire it with a share swap [1]. Even a smaller company could buy it with an LBO [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_swap

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveraged_buyout

> ... but I have to push back on the idea that Anthropic will be acquired. Their most recent valuation was $380B, and even if they wanted to be acquired (which I doubt) essentially no company has the necessary capital.

isn't that pretty much why anthropic and openai are racing to IPO?