In the high-growth phase, dramatic reversals of fortune can happen in the blink of an eye. Anthropic's breakout took just one year to go from underdog to a company approaching trillion-dollar valuation. When we look at Anthropic's nearly $1 trillion valuation today, it's easy to assume it was a steady, linear climb. It wasn't. The real inflection point came in May-June of last year. Last May, Anthropic shipped the general availability version of Claude Code. Within six months, it hit a $1 billion annualized run rate. Less than a year later, it had surpassed $2.5 billion. By April 2026, the company's overall ARR had blown past $30 billion. From last May to this May, that single year became Anthropic's true explosion. It was fueled by the massive pent-up demand for AI-native coding finally being unlocked — creating one of the largest super-cycles tech has ever seen. Many believe AI coding will ultimately be the biggest commercial application of AI by far. Nothing else is likely to match its scale. Anthropic seized that critical window and became the fastest-growing company in the entire AI sector. Surpassing OpenAI now looks inevitable. And looking further ahead, there's a credible case that Anthropic could eventually eclipse even Nvidia. History shows that when a new paradigm emerges, hardware companies lead first — but the enduring giants who capture the majority of the value are usually the ones that own the operating system or platform layer. In the age of AI, that platform may very well be Anthropic.