A leaked error log string is lighting up prediction markets, with Polymarket now implying 86% odds that Anthropic's "Claude 5" arrives by March 31.
The chatter centers on a model-style identifier allegedly seen in Vertex AI screenshots late Sunday: claude-sonnet-5@20260203 — interpreted by traders as a possible Feb. 3 (Tuesday) release tag.
None of this is confirmed by Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) or Anthropic, but the market is trading it anyway.
Why it matters
With the entire stock market levered to the promise of artificial intelligence, a credible upgrade for Claude reinforces the AI trade’s core assumption: bigger is better.
Hyperscalers keep spending, and the AI industry keeps printing.
GPT-5, released in August 2025 to much fanfare, quickly turned into a major disappointment.
If Claude 5 also disappoints, the market might begin to question what all this spending is actually buying.
The “Scaling Laws are broken” narrative gained traction in Q4 2025, cooling investor sentiment across the semiconductor and software sectors.
If models are hitting a plateau, the valuations of NVIDIA Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA) and the hyperscalers become harder to justify.
A successful Claude 5 launch, specifically one that demonstrates a leap in reasoning capabilities, would validate the current spending cycle and likely bid up the entire AI sector.
It could also pressure Google's competing Gemini narrative, while being a revenue tailwind for Google Cloud.
The Google Paradox
Anthropic is already distributed on Vertex AI and has said it's expanding its use of Google Cloud TPUs and services to train and serve Claude models.
If Claude 5 wins market share and more inference routes through Google's stack (Vertex AI and related infrastructure), Google captures the compute "toll" — more prompts, more cloud consumption.
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is Anthropic’s primary backer, with $8 billion invested in the company, while Google has also invested roughly $2 billion.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic are currently in a race to see who can list first.
Anthropic is reportedly raising at a $350 billion price tag.
To justify that valuation, Claude 5 cannot just be “as good” as GPT-5; it must be demonstrably better at reasoning and coding.
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