SUBSTACK
Not a product launch. Not an earnings miss. Not a competitor undercutting on price. A five-minute blog post explaining that Claude can read COBOL. IBM dropped 13%. Worst single-day loss since October 2000. Twenty-five years of stock resilience ended with one AI company publishing a capability update.
Here’s what happened:
95% of ATM transactions in America run on COBOL. Hundreds of billions of lines of power banking, airlines, and government systems. The developers who built them retired decades ago. The knowledge was left with them. Finding engineers who can even read COBOL gets harder every quarter.
IBM’s moat was never the technology. It was the fact that nobody else could understand it. Entire consulting empires existed because the code was too old, too tangled, and too critical to touch. Companies paid IBM billions because the alternative was catastrophic system failure.
Then Anthropic published a blog post saying Claude Code can map dependencies across thousands of lines of COBOL, document workflows, identify migration risks, and translate legacy logic into modern languages. Modernization in quarters instead of years.
The market heard: the priesthood just lost its monopoly on the sacred language.
And this isn’t the first time. Last week, Anthropic announced Claude Code Security for vulnerability scanning. CrowdStrike dropped. Okta dropped. Cloudflare dropped. One company is serially destroying legacy moats with blog posts.
Now here’s where it gets surreal.
This same company, on the same day, also published evidence that three Chinese AI labs ran 24,000 fake accounts and 16 million exchanges to steal Claude’s capabilities. DeepSeek used it to build censorship tools. MiniMax pivoted within 24 hours when a new model dropped, redirecting half its traffic to steal the latest version.
And yesterday, the Pentagon summoned this same company’s CEO for what officials called a “sh*t-or-get-off-the-pot meeting,” threatening to blacklist them like Huawei for refusing to let the military use Claude without safety restrictions.
Three stories. One company. Twenty-four hours.
The company destroying legacy moats faster than the market can reprice them is simultaneously being threatened by its own government and looted by foreign competitors.
Anthropic is valued at $380 billion. Its CEO says a 12-month delay in AI would make him bankrupt. The Pentagon wants to designate it a supply chain risk. Chinese labs are running industrial espionage against it. And it just proved it can vaporize $30 billion in market cap with a Monday morning blog post.
Whatever you think about AI disruption, IBM’s stock just settled the argument.
Full institutional analysis on my Substack.
THIS IS IT!
The Growth Miracle and the Six Fractures: Anthropic at $380 Billion
Why the Fastest-Growing Enterprise in History May Be the Most Mispriced Name in TechnologyBy Shanaka Anslem Perera
February 16, 2026
I. The Fastest Company in History Is Running Out of Road
Every institutional investor with a technology allocation has the same number circled on their whiteboard this morning: twenty-seven.
That is the ratio of Anthropic’s enterprise value to its annualized revenue after Anthropic closed a $30 billion Series G round on February 12, 2026, at a $380 billion post-money valuation. Twenty-seven times revenue for a company that did not exist four years ago. Twenty-seven times revenue for a company whose chief executive told Fortune, days after banking the largest private funding round in history, that a twelve-month delay in artificial intelligence progress would make him bankrupt.
The number deserves to sit on that whiteboard because it encodes a bet most allocators have not fully priced. At 27x, investors are not purchasing a stake in an enterprise software company. They are purchasing a derivative on the exact arrival date of what Dario Amodei calls “a country of geniuses in a datacenter,” and that derivative has a strike price denominated in tens of billions of dollars of infrastructure spending that cannot be recalled if the underlying assumption shifts by a single calendar year.
The revenue beneath the multiple is real. Anthropic grew from $1 billion in annualized revenue in December 2024 to $4 billion by July 2025, $9 billion by December 2025, and $14 billion by the second week of February 2026, a trajectory that represents 10x annual growth sustained for three consecutive years. No enterprise technology company in recorded history has compounded at this rate at this scale. Claude Code, Anthropic’s agentic coding product, went from zero revenue to more than $2.5 billion in annualized billings in approximately nine months, with business subscriptions quadrupling in the six weeks since January 1. More than 500 customers now spend over $1 million annually, up from roughly a dozen two years ago. Eight of the ten largest companies on the Fortune 10 list are Claude customers.
This is not a question of whether Anthropic has built something extraordinary. It has. The question confronting every allocator evaluating this name is whether six structural fractures, each independently capable of derailing the thesis, are adequately compensated by a multiple that requires near-perfect execution through 2028 in a market where six well-capitalized competitors are converging on capability parity, inference costs are declining by an order of magnitude annually, and Anthropic’s own CEO has publicly acknowledged that the margin between transcendent success and insolvency is measured in quarters.
Inside this analysis: the precise mechanism by which Anthropic’s unit economics diverge from its narrative, the customer concentration paradox that turns its fastest-growing product into a threat to its largest revenue source, the three distribution walls that closed simultaneously in January 2026, the $4.5 billion legal minefield that names the founder personally, the Pentagon standoff that transforms a safety brand into a revenue constraint, and the competitive convergence that is collapsing the technical moat on which the entire valuation thesis depends.
The positions in this name are already being built. The question is whether they are being built on the right side.
II. The Margin Bridge That Does Not Exist: 40% Gross Margins Wearing a 27x Software Multiple
The consensus narrative around Anthropic’s financial trajectory treats the revenue number as the story and the margin structure as a detail that will resolve itself at scale. This is precisely backwards. Revenue at 40% gross margins and revenue at 77% gross margins are different businesses entirely, and the distance between where Anthropic sits today and where it needs to arrive by 2028 represents one of the most aggressive margin expansion assumptions ever embedded in a private technology valuation.
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