Every Model Has a Six-month Shelf Life Now

Hello, and welcome to the weekday edition of Context Window. Grant Harvey is Every’s newest staff writer, and he’ll be bringing you what the Every team is testing, debating, and building with AI.

Anthropic filed to go public on Monday, and its S-1 puts a number on something we’ve seen at Every: When a new model drops, many of us switch to it as our daily driver. Models older than six months earn less than 20 percent of Anthropic’s revenue. Today, we unpack what that means for which model you should be using. Plus: head of evals Mike Taylor on how to look like a specialist while staying a generalist, how he had Claude move his website off Webflow over morning coffee, and the industry stories we couldn’t stop talking about.—Kate Lee

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Anthropic bets you’ll keep upgrading. That’s a good bet for you, too.

What happened: Anthropic filed to go public on Monday. In his S-1 breakdown for Every, Evan Armstrong compares Anthropic to a movie studio: You’re only as good as your next release.

The filing showed how heavily Anthropic depends on its newest models. Models older than six months earn less than 20 percent of its revenue. And the $16.3 billion it brought in during the first half of 2026 came before its two newest and most well-received models, Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1, were released. As Mike put it, “This is all Opus 5 money.” Other notable takeaways from its filing:

• Customers from a year ago now pay about nine times as much.
• The company lost only* $693 million on operations in the first half of 2026.
• Anthropic says its latest releases cut customers’ cost per task by 25 to 45 percent, through lower prices, and more efficient models.