Claude beat ChatGPT to become the top free US app on Apple last week.
- ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood compared Anthropic’s Claude AI to the early days of the personal computer revolution.
- She said Claude automated multiple internal finance workflows that had been planned for months of development with ease.
- Alongside this, Claude rapidly rose in popularity as Anthropic faced growing scrutiny from the Pentagon.
As ARK Invest continues to shift capital toward AI infrastructure and platforms, CEO Cathie Wood has called Anthropic’s Claude AI 'A True PC' moment, seeing potential similar to the personal computer revolution back in the 1980s.
Speaking in the latest episode of the In the Know (ITK) series, she compared Claude AI’s development to IBM's introduction of its first personal computer and Apple's release of Lisa in 1983. “This was the moment when [people] gathered to see what it was and what it could do,” she added.
Back then, those systems could only do simple tasks and basic math, but they eventually changed the world economy. She said that something similar happened recently with her team when a finance worker used Claude to finish projects that had been on hold for months. Wood says the employee was surprised by how quickly the AI generated detailed tables, graphs, and calculations, and that the results were checked against manual calculations to ensure they were correct.
She added that she was “blown away by how quickly he was able to automate all of these automation projects that he had lined up over the past six months.”
Wood pointed out that the rise of cloud computing in the middle of the 2000s and later improvements in deep learning and transformer models were important steps that have led to the current wave of AI innovation.
Last week, ARK Invest put more money into several AI and computing companies, including Baidu (BIDU), CoreWeave (CRWV), and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). The company is still allocating funds to AI infrastructure and platforms.
Claude’s Rise Amid Industry Tensions
Wood's comments come at a time when Anthropic's Claude AI was becoming increasingly popular in the AI field. Last week, Claude rose to the #1 spot on free US apps on Apple, beating ChatGPT. This happened after tensions rose between Anthropic and the US Department of War, after Anthropic refused to allow the military access to users’ data for Pentagon-linked projects and mass surveillance.
Despite the controversy, Wood suggested that the rapid improvement in AI tools showed the technology could be entering a phase in which multiple innovations converged at once, accelerating adoption across industries.
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