Silicon Valley's favorite metric is measuring the wrong business

SILICON VALLEY'S favorite growth metric has never had a better year. Cursor went from zero to $1bn of annual recurring revenue in under two years; Lovable and Emergent both crossed $100m in under eight months; Anthropic's annualised top line just surpassed $30bn, overtaking OpenAI. Founders trade screenshots of hockey-stick charts, investors return their calls in minutes, and the ARR number — once the painstaking reward of a decade of enterprise-software discipline — has become the headline act of the AI boom. The only trouble is that the deeper you read into the accompanying disclosures, where they exist at all, the more the number starts to look like something SaaS investors have seen before. And it isn't revenue.