Good morning. Five years after its founding, Anthropic is preparing for what could be one of the largest IPOs in history. Its coding agent, Claude Code, is already generating an annualized revenue run rate exceeding $2.5 billion. At the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen on Monday, Boris Cherny, the architect behind Claude Code, made clear why that number is only the beginning—and why the implications extend well beyond engineering teams.
“In the past, there were 50 million people in the world who could code,” Cherny said during a conversation with Fortune AI editor Jeremy Kahn. “Now everyone is starting to be able to code. We’re only beginning to understand the implications.”
For CFOs, those implications are immediate—and financial.
Rethinking the ROI framework
The most actionable insight Cherny offered centered on cost justification. Early Claude Code customers balked at the price compared with $20-per-month AI subscriptions, wondering whether Claude was really different from other products.
