Revenue accelerated through the summer, not plateaued: annualized run-rate rose from $47B in May to $65B by end of July, with Q2 revenue of $11.5B versus $787M a year earlier. OpenAI's run-rate reached $40B by August 13 — up from a $25B plateau — but Anthropic's absolute lead grew from roughly $20B in May to $25B in August.

Compute commitments kept compounding: a $19B, 20-year TeraWulf lease signed July 6 and a $45B, six-year Nscale deal signed August 26 stack atop existing hyperscaler spend. Revenue is outrunning commitments for now, but AI-capex intensity across the sector means any slowdown in enterprise AI spending hits Anthropic's fixed obligations before it hits revenue.

Capital markets keep pricing the lead: IPO target reports put valuation near $2T as of September 14, roughly double the $977B Series H mark, while Altman ruled out an OpenAI IPO this year over safety concerns. Three flagship releases since June — Fable 5, Sonnet 5, Opus 5's claimed SOTA on Frontier-Bench — sustained the product cadence underpinning that premium.

The enterprise moat deepened structurally: Cognizant joined as a Global Premier Partner July 27, and Ode with Anthropic — the Blackstone- and Hellman & Friedman-backed services firm — acquired Casper Studios August 20. Distribution is no longer just hyperscaler resale; Anthropic now owns a services layer converting model access into enterprise deployment.