Anthropic CEO says AI growth is becoming 'too hard to handle'

Anthropic witnessed 80x year-over-year growth in revenue and usage during Q1 2026, a surge so explosive that CEO Dario Amodei joked his company should have wished for "merely 10x" instead.

The rapid growth has far exceeded the initial infrastructure expectations of the AI company, leaving its management scrambling to source computing power to satisfy the overwhelming demands from developers.

Anthropic's AI coding platform, Claude Code, was unexpectedly revealed as the key to the rapid growth, swiftly aligning itself with software developers who embraced new coding tools most rapidly.

By late 2025, the product had enough momentum that Anthropic was able to outperform other players who had ruled the market only months prior. The engineers saw how useful Claude Code could be in boosting their productivity, thus setting off adoption curves that neither Anthropic nor its competition foresaw.

According to Amodei, the rapid uptake among developers was just a taste of future AI adoption trends sweeping through the entire economy, with coding just being the beginning.

To handle the crushing demand, Anthropic announced it has secured 300 megawatts of new computing power at SpaceX's Colossus One data centre. Ami Vora, Anthropic's product chief, explained that the additional compute chips will extend developer session lengths and reduce wait times plaguing the platform.

Amodei has built a reputation as an AI risk sceptic, historically warning about rapid adoption's dangers and predicting AI could write "essentially all" code within a year.