Pulse News

**Anthropic’s Claude Drives Strong Revenue Growth While Powering ‘Manus’ Sensation**

By Juro Osawa, Natasha Mascarenhas, and Stephanie Palazzolo

Mar 11, 2025, 8:30am PDT

Anthropic's year is off to a good start. Its annualized revenue—a measure of the past month's revenue multiplied by 12—has grown from $1 billion at the end of last year to $1.4 billion as of earlier this month, according to a person who has seen the numbers. In other words, Anthropic is generating more than $115 million a month. That's roughly the same revenue pace its rival OpenAI reached in November 2023.

If Anthropic keeps up that kind of growth, it would beat its "base case" (or most likeliest outcome) revenue projection of $2 billion for 2025 but would still need to grow significantly faster to hit its optimistic projection of $4 billion.

**Web-Browsing Agents Have a Moment**

What's been slower to take off is artificial intelligence that can use a web browser, otherwise known as a computer-using agent, which both Anthropic and OpenAI released in recent months. But last week, videos of people using such an agent, Manus, went viral on X and other social sites. In Manus's video demonstration, posted on YouTube, the agent compiles an in-depth stock analysis report and looks for New York properties that fit the buyer's budget and preferences. The real estate example involved browsing many sites that helped determine the safest neighborhoods with the best schools, for instance.

In an X post, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey called the demo "excellent." Manus has been available on an invitation-only basis since its launch last week. But the startup behind Manus gave some AI influencers on X the chance to use the product, which further increased the breathless commentary about it.

It's possible that the hype around Manus stemmed from the rising interest in Chinese-made AI products, thanks to DeepSeek. The team that developed Manus is in China, though the corporate entity behind Manus is registered in Singapore under the name Butterfly Effect Pte. The startup previously developed an AI assistant called Monica.

**Was Manus a redux of DeepSeek?**

Not quite. It turns out Manus is using Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet model to help power the agent, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation, plus an array of other publicly available open source tools and techniques. Manus itself even tells users about Claude's role in powering it, and chief scientist Peak Ji, one of the startup's cofounders, went through some of its technical strategy here.

Our colleague Juro managed to get hold of an invitation code for Manus and his experience wasn't quite as smooth as the demos Manus showed in its YouTube video. He asked Manus to make plans for and book a trip to Tokyo from Hong Kong, including flights, hotels, restaurants, activities, and transportation. Manus browsed various websites to search for the cheapest available flights from Hong Kong to Tokyo for the exact dates, hotels with vacancies in areas near his preferred activities, and transportation methods based on train schedules.

But Manus also ran into obstacles while searching for flights, as Expedia's website had a Captcha quiz to determine that the visitor was human. Manus asked Juro to either intervene and handle the quiz, or to let Manus continue with alternative methods like using Google Flights. Juro chose the latter option.

To be fair, Manus is still a work in progress. In its YouTube video, Ji, the cofounder, described last week's launch as an "early preview." No matter how Manus created a somewhat competent computer-using agent, there's no doubt it has moved the ball forward in showing what's possible. That's great for OpenAI, Anthropic, and their ilk.

**Here's what else is going on...**

**Deals and Debuts**

Core Weave, a cloud startup, signed a five-year deal with OpenAI valued at $11.9 billion, Reuters reported. As part of the deal, OpenAI will receive a stake in CoreWeave worth about $350 million tied to the company's upcoming initial public offering.

Lila Sciences, a Boston-based AI startup targeting life, chemical, and materials sciences, raised $200 million in seed funding led by Flagship Pioneering, with participation from General Catalyst, March Capital, ARK Venture Fund, Altitude Life Science Ventures, Blue Horizon Advisors, State of Michigan Retirement System, Modi Ventures, and a wholly owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.

Workhelix, which consults companies on how to use AI and measure its performance, raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by AIX Ventures, with participation from Andrew Ng's AI Fund, Accenture Ventures, BGV, Bloomberg Beta, Future of Work Partners, Telesoft, Zetta Ventures, Paul Daugherty, Jeff Dean, Reid Hoffman, Yann LeCun, Mira Murati, Sebastian Thrun, and Jeff Wilke.

AvatarOS, an AI-powered virtual influencer startup, raised $7 million in seed funding led by M13, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz Games Fund, HF0, Valia Ventures, and Mento VC.

Foxconn, the electronics maker, announced its first LLM, Foxbrain. Sony is testing out using AI to power a PlayStation video game character, the Verge reported.