I think the subtext of the last few weeks is the Anthropic was becoming severely capacity constrained (or approaching that). They seem to have had to sign two somewhat adverse contracts with Amazon and Google in short succession. suddenly model quality is back up again.
What is all this AI doing? People are spending 10’s to 100’s of billions and no service or technology seems better or cheaper. Everything is more expensive and worse.
I'm burning an insane number of tokens 8-12 hours a day for the dramatic improvement of some internal tooling at a big tech company. Using it heavily for an unannounced future project as well.
We suddenly have a proliferation of new internal tools and resources, nearly all of which are barely functional and largely useless with no discernible impact on the overall business trajectory but sure do seem to help come promo time.
Barely an hour goes by without a new 4-page document about something that that everyone is apparently ment to read, digest and respond to, despite its author having done none of those steps, it's starting to feel actively adversarial.
Im convinced none of these people have any training in corporate finance. For if they did they'd realise they were wasting money.
I guess you gotta look busy. But the stick will come when the shareholders look at the income statement and ask... So I see an increase in operating expenses. Let me go calculate the ROIC. Hm its lower, what to do? Oh I know, lets fire the people who caused this (it wont be the C-Suite or management who takes the fall) lmao.
AI is truly perfect for internal tooling. Security is less or no concern, bugs are more acceptable, performance / scalability rarely a concern. Quickest way to get things done, and speed up production development, MVP development etc.
I’m not them but we have vastly improved our internal pipeline monitoring/triage/root cause/etc by having a new system that basically its whole purpose is to hook into all of our other systems and consolidate it under a single view with an emphasis on shortening the amount of time it takes to triage and refine issues.
This will have previously been too ambitious to ever scope but we’ve been able to build essentially all of it in just two months. Since it sits on top of our other systems and acts as more of a window/pass through control pane, the fact that it’s vibe coded poses little risk since we still have all the existing infrastructure under it if something goes awry.
I have some coworker who says something similar, he vibe coded tons of cryptic code, which indeed solves some problem though could be way more compact and well structured. Now it is hitting complexity limitation, since llm now cant comprehend it, and human cant comprehend it by large a margin.
I'm wondering whether the layoffs are partly targeting people who haven't adapted to using AI tools, particularly those who are openly dismissive of AI-assisted work.
I'm spending a ton of tokens because it insists on manually correcting code that fails the linter, despite the instructions in the AGENTS.md to run the linter with autocorrect.
And also because the Plan agent generates a huge plan, asks me a couple yes/no questions with an obvious answer, and then regenerates the entire plan again. Then the Build agent gets confused anyway and does something else, and I have to round-trip about 5 times with that full context each time.
And yet.. building shit is no longer the sole domain of the software engineer.
That's the sea change.
I've literally had finance and GTM stand things up for themselves in the last few weeks. A few tweaks (obviously around security and access), and they are good to go.
They've gone from wrangling spreadsheets to smooth automated workflows that allow them to work at a higher level in a matter of months.
That's what all this AI is doing. The shit we could never get the time to get around to doing.
The only thing that matters is the impact on the financials. The shareholders (the people who employ you) dont care about any of this if it does not enhance value.
I don't follow Anthropic enough to know what claims its CEO has made, but it is factual that Altman is a pathological liar. You can observe this for yourself by reading and listening to the things he says and then comparing them to reality. We have years of evidence to look back on. The chasm between Altman's reality and everyone else's is so large and so well-known that it was one of the chief factors cited by the board when he was fired.
(I would then argue that he was re-hired because others involved with OpenAI understood that it is literally his job to lie and that OpenAI would not be where it is today as a corporate behemoth rather than a research non-profit without a world-class liar marketing it, but that is merely conjecture.)
As far as I understand run rate revenue is just a fancy way of saying that "the last month we had sales, and if that continues for a year we will have a AAR of 30B. meaning it's not 30B yet, but the sales numbers indicates that we get there by continue selling at the current speed. But to have revenue of $100 and get $30B in ARR I guess the period looked at needs to be seconds....
(Run Rate = Revenue in Period / # of Days in Period x 365)
They're pointing out that run-rate revenue is based on essentially sampling revenue over some limited time interval, then extrapolating from there assuming revenue always occurs at the same rate (or greater) over all similar intervals in the future. More specifically, they're pointing out that estimates of ARR derived from this kind of sampling are fundamentally prone to error and can be arbitrarily inflated based on how the time interval is sampled.
Perhaps the adversity of the contracts cancels out with their sudden success and increase in valuation and it ends up a wash compared to the counterfactual scenario where they would have speculated on high growth early on.
Well to a certain extent it also blunts competition, Gemini is less of a threat if their main investor is also backing Anthropic. The issue is when the pyramid scheme collapses...
Both Amazon and Google provide the Claude models via their Kiro and Antigravity IDEs respectively. It could also be investing in their attempt to own the IDE space.
It feels like the market is full Wiley Coyote on frontier model makers, and I like Anthropic's B2B business model.
But all progress points to a commodification of foundation models--Google first named it as "we have no moat, neither does anyone else." So there must be some secondary play driving this, right? Hardware sales? Hedging for search ad revenue?
Still feels mispriced. I think asset inflation leaves too much money desperate for the Next Big Thing.
Google does have a sort of temporary moat. They have a much better hardware supply line story than anyone else and the revenue to maintain that edge indefinitely.
Running AI at a loss long enough to kill the competition would run afoul of antitrust laws. Even more so since they’re bundling their AI products with their search monopoly.
Although I doubt this will stop them if they think it’s advantageous…
I thought that these type of antitrust laws are in no way enforced anymore in the tech industry. And that it's been that way for decades. I mean the sheer existence of Google shows that right? What about Maps, Mail, Books... basically everything apart from Search? Why would an AI Mode as one category of Search results be any different? They're not actively promoting Gemini in those search results. They're simply augmenting it with this new tool that exists now.
As long it further's American interests globally - monopoly is fine. Other countries need to take notice and start picking winners nationally in order to compete with the large American big tech firms.
Eh, I think this is actually not a specifically American thing. More of a neo-liberal mindset. Competition may be good in the long term. But a monopoly now may mean more money in your pocket now. The tech giants definitely give the US some geo-political power in some cases but in general the US would be better off with more competition.
ed: @er2d, can't reply to your comment for some reason, so doing it here:
I don't agree. In theory a monopoly decreases the necessity for R&D. Of course this becomes more complex if the R&D is funded or steered by the state. But look at the current state of LLMs. There is fierce competition between 3 US companies. But geopolitically it's the same as if there would be one monopoly. The US being the clear technological leader in an industry is not dependent on that industry being a domestic monopoly.
And for the Europe comment:
Also don't agree. Look at Boeing & Airbus. Both are companies where the US & EU have decided that they need to ensure the existence of a domestic airplane manufacturer. So in these cases they support these companies (often in violation of international trade laws). But it has nothing to do with monopolies. If a state decides to support a company to ensure its existence, a monopoly is the logical consequence and not the aim. Because if that industry would be profitable it wouldn't need to be supported in the first place.
But all these tech companies are not in industries that would move off-shore or stop existing because they're not profitable enough, so it's an entirely different setting.
> You know what's also really hard in a vacuum? Dissipating heat
Correct. The economics of space-based DCs basically comes down to permitting delays versus radiator mass. At ISS-weight radiators (10 to 15 W/kg), you need almost decade-long delays on the ground (or 10+ percent interest rates) to make lifting worthwhile. Get down to current state-of-the-art in the 5 to 10 W/kg range, however, and you only need permiting delays of 3 to 5 years.
If there is a game-changing start-up waiting to be built, it's in someone commercialising a better vacuum-rated radiator.
I really couldn't have been more obscure, could I? :P
In 1932, "the first oil field in the Persian Gulf outside of Iran" was discovered in Bahrain [1]. (The same year Saudi Arabia announced unification [2].)
In the end, Saudi Arabia had larger reserves and wound up geopolitically dominating its first-moving rival. In commodities, the game tends to be scale in part through land grabbing. Less who got where first.
To close the analogy, if AI does wind up commoditised, the layers at which that commodity is held are probably between power and compute [3]. So if AI commoditises (commodifies?), Google selling computer (and indirectly power) to Anthropic and OpenAI is the smarter play than trying to advantage Gemini. (If AI doesn't commoditise, the opposite may be true–Google is supercharging a competitor.)
I haven't thought about any secondary play, but if these companies converge on Google's TPUs, they would probably eagerly slice from NVIDIA's current market.
> In September 2025, Google is in talks with several "neoclouds," including Crusoe and CoreWeave, about deploying TPU in their datacenter. In November 2025, Meta is in talks with Google to deploy TPUs in its AI datacenters.
I keep getting notification from my tooling that gemini models are overloaded so we switched you to openai. So I feel google is not ready to sell tpu’s just yet.
It feels like Anthropic is everybody's insurance policy against someone else winning the AI race. So you have Amazon, Google, Microsoft basically every major tech company pushing their own tech hard but simultaneously ensuring they have a survival level stake in Anthropic if they can't build or acquire their way to stay at frontier level performance themselves.
It is very difficult for me to see any amount of money being thrown at Anthropic as a bad idea.
The amount of new revenue that I am personally able to create for my clients, using Claude models for dev, and Claude models inside the insanely agile products delivered, is astounding.
If I was not currently experiencing this myself, and someone told me that this was possible, I would be calling them names.
You could say the same about Codex (and other tooling). Opus as a model is market leading (trading blows with the greatest that OpenAI is peddling), but there will be a reckoning when open weight models are good enough - and I'd argue we are almost there with some of the latest releases. If you hook up the latest OpenAI models to something like OpenCode, its a taste of what an open harness with a powerful model (outside of a providers ecosystem) will be able to offer developers in the future.
googles multiple businesses and gemini isn't the largest one.
anthropic is the anchor external customer of tpu's and nvidia is worth more than all of google. If tpu's actually breakout as a viable alternative over the next few years for multiple clients the business could easily be worth as much as search, maybe more.
You essentially have to run in google to use them and that probably limits their ability to breakout. Anthropic might be doing this deal as a way to shore up their supply chain and cost of both inference and training by leveraging Google's hardware and chip manufacturing expertise.
there are literally not enough tpu's on earth for them to break out, every tpu thats been made is in use, the spike in demand is recent and google has heavy competition for foundry space.
Possibly because they just haven't been able to manufacture enough of them yet to be a viable business to others? They're fighting everyone else for foundry space and time.
> Microsoft in 1997 investing $150 million in Apple, saving it from near bankruptcy.
If only Apple could pass the favor forward. But no, they can't be bothered to invest even a single million in Asashi Linux to benefit their own hardware.
Of course this is well known. Everything Microsoft does is for selfish capitalist reasons and everything Apple does is for altruistic philanthropic reasons.
It just keeps the lights on for the whole industry.
The tech is great but valuations are out of control. It's cheaper to keep valuations high through these circular financing deals, rather than to allow for any deflation.
That was precisely my thought on seeing the news. I did not know about Google's existing entanglements with anthropic, but it seemed like a clear message - Do not panic on the money, do the work.
What's the explanation behind this? I am sure they use AI in their ad network (matching web sites with ad offerings, maybe generating ads automatically), but is there more to it?
I know AI companies are selling ad training into the models so the models know about your product. I'm not sure if that is what they were referring to, but it could be related.
It's an actual bubble specific to AI. This investment is just another example of the bubble. Pre-2008, all the investment would be coming from banks. Post-2008, all the investment came from VCs... but VCs got tapped out, so AI companies went to bigger private capital. They tapped out all the private capital. So now they're making the rounds, making deals with any corporations left with tens/hundreds of billions in cash, because they're the only possible investors left. When all of them are tapped out, and without a release of pressure from the hardware market, the only investor left will be the government. After that it's kaplooie.
You'll notice that all the really big deals have fallen through, because they're based on promises and meeting objectives that can't be met. So it's likely that there will be really big writeoffs but not a huge implosion like 2001/2008. The real losers will be the retail investors who put all their money in a handful of stocks at ridiculous valuations.
If you added up all the major AI valuations, it's apparently worth more than products Americans constantly buy and rely on for their main life. So either AI is going to be involved in every Americans life to a large degree, and paying real money for, or these valuations are insanely wrong.
Valuations are based on future expected earnings, not revenue. It cost Ford a lot of money to make that $60k car. The margins for AI companies are unknown but the market is pricing that they’ll be higher at one point. Not that they’ll attract more revenue from the average person.
> My neighbors just gave Ford $60k. It'll be a while until my neighbor gives Anthropic $60k.
How much of that 60K does Ford actually keep? And how much will it be once BYD is allowed in the US? The forecast for Ford is pretty much only downwards, the possible upside on AI is huge.
If every company in the F500 starts spending $2000+ on AI credits per employee, then every consumer product will indirectly be funding AI companies. I think it's already the case that companies small enough to avoid/skip getting O365 or Google Suite subscriptions will pay for AI first.
I guess I’m not surprised that if one “added up all the major AI valuations,” it’s more than any single consumer purchase or even most single companies.
At 20 year depreciation it’s $250 a month. Close to Anthropic’s $200 model. IMHO at this point a lot of developers would rather walk than code manually.
I'm not sure exactly what kind of point you are making but the valuations are at least nominally based on the expected value of the business far into the future and aren't comparable to, say, purchases done over a year despite both being denoted in dollars.
Hopefully this money means more compute infrastructure to help Anthropic counter the efficiency changes that have created this perceived downtrend in claude quality.
Google buys Anthropic.
Microsoft buys Open AI (or vice versa depending on how things go).
SpaceGrok buys Cursor, limps along in 3rd place.
Meta is the last man standing, get's stuck with Oracle, dies.
And then hopefully some open source models save us from this nightmare before China commadatises everything.
Edit: I forgot Amazon. Who knows what they will do. They're the wildcard anyway.
OpenAI buying Microsoft.. I honestly think I'd like to see that.
Anything to invigorate the desktop.
Microsoft buying OpenAI.. 10 minutes later it's rebranded Copilot.. and.. nothing much changes in the world. Oh, except all the AI improvements are around Enterprise governance.
> the efficiency changes that have created this perceived downtrend in claude quality”
Why the euphemism? What Anthropic did was an aggressive degradation of their model to save compute, and it's not just “perceived downtrend”, Anthropic themselves have acknowledged the quality of service degradation.
At this point if you have cash or compute credits laying around in the tens of billions, better to hedge your bets than to find out the winner that took all was not you.
Unless none of the current crop of AI companies is “the winner,” either because a newcomer appears or the craze fizzles… in which case have $40B in the bank seems superior.
Urs used to talk (internally) about not publishing "industry-enabling papers" which is why most Google infrastructure papers were describing something that had already been turned off, or was already in the process of being replaced by the next system (GFS, Vitess, etc). The things that did get published were either considered not key advantages, that other companies simply cannot do, things that other companies wouldn't bother doing, or experiments that never worked at all. There were exceptions of course. But it led to a public perception of the Google stack involving mostly technologies that were long dead or were never adopted.
"Attention Is All You Need" was a very very different thing and I also wonder if they are glad they published it. But I imagine if they hadn't, the motivation for researchers to leave Google would have been even larger.
It makes every bit as much sense as investing in Snap while still operating their own social network product. Seems to have worked out fine (for Google, not Snap).
Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Meta, Nvidia. All their stock gains in the last 2 or so years were because of the AI hype. And who knows how much money the borrowed and promises they made on the assumption that their stock will continue to rise in the same pace for years to come. When one domino falls, they will follow. So they have every incentive to keep the music going for one of their "friends".
Cool. Will they use their balance sheets to pour all of this cash or are they going to bring the banking system to its knees and then we bail out everyone again ?
"The Alphabet subsidiary is committing to invest $10 billion now, at a $350 billion valuation for Anthropic, with another $30 billion to follow if Anthropic hits certain performance targets, according to Anthropic."
this is insane. on the secondary market the valuation is 2-3x that. what gives?
Anthropic raised $30 billion at a $350 billion valuation (pre-money) in February.
Google's deal from prior rounds likely lets them buy in at the same valuation other investors get every round, so they're just getting the February valuation.
Amazon did almost the same thing last week, at the same valuation.
Googles giving them something thats a lot more scares to them then dollars, large volumes of chips quickly.
If you gave anthropic 10b cash they couldn't get chips in the 0-6mo timeframe at scale. Anthropic is suffering reputational damage due to choices they have to make around capacity constraints.
Google, AWS, and Azure are the only people who can help them so they hold the cards, thus the good terms.
The GOOG and AMZN deals announced earlier this week would be considered part of the same Feb'26 round. I.e. it would have the same seniority rights as that round.
It is not uncommon to keep a round open after the formal announcement for a bit so that few investors who could not close for whatever reason are part of it. It can be hard to line up everyone at the same time, especially when they are public companies.
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Specific to your point on why valuation can be lower than market at the same time - Goods(and stocks) while feel to be homogeneous, divisible, fungible, they are not. Size can value of its own.
A block of 10% shares may be worth more (or less) than unit share price, because them being available together has a property of its own, making it either more desirable when someone wants to acquire or harder to sell because there is not enough demand if all of them get dumped at the same time
[1]
In this deal terms, just cause few ten millions are trading at $850B, or some investors can put in say $1-2B doesn't mean you can raise $40B at the same valuation.
There isn't depth in the market to raise $65B (including the AMZN deal) at $850B valuation. There is always some demand at any price point in the demand supply curve, you will probably find few people who will buy few shares at $10T, or $100T or some ridiculous number but that doesn't mean you can raise a large round on that.
Strictly speaking it is not even $350B per se, i.e. Google and AWS benefit from this as vendors. It very much like vendor financing with convertible debt. Meaning it is worth that much to them, but not to you and me because we are not getting some of the money back as sales that boosts are own stock.
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[1] In the same vein, price can also depend on what you are getting in return, hard immediate dollars is the highest value. However if you are getting shares in return, you can usually negotiate a premium depending on risk of the shares you are getting.
The recent SpaceX - Cursor deal is a good example, any founder would likely take say $10B all cash offer over the $60B from SpaceX, or price would be closer to cash if it GOOG, AMZN, APPL shares instead - proven deeply liquid market etc.
That's the last round they raised at. They had other offers from VCs at ~850B they rejected. Seems like may have been in works since that last round was being raised and just finished paperwork?
It’s pretty wild how badly Altman siding with Hegseth has backfired. (And how competently Dario has played his hand.)
I don’t think that’s the ultimate cause of the turnaround in fortunes. But it strikes me, at least from the investor and potentially urban-consumer perspectives, as a pivotal moment in both companies’ fortunes.
Ant's recent rise has little to none to do with retail subscribers, it is Claude Code with Opus 4.5+, followed by their Mythos stunt
I would say the flood of $20 Claude Subscribers due to news cycle backfired on them, now everyone is getting worse outputs and exposed their shortage on compute, which they can't fix anytime soon.
Pretty much everyone I know has both cc and codex now, just because how unreliable cc has become.
> would say the flood of 20+ Claude Subscribers due to news cycle backfired
This is a good hypothesis. I suspect we are both correct.
The PR boost from Anthropic standing its ground drove signups. That, in turn, drove investors. But the users also drove utilization, which degraded quality across the board.
My hypothesis rests on Anthropic’s user mix having significantly shifted to consumers (versus enterprise) after the mix-up. Whenever we get public numbers it would be interesting to test that.
I think it was psychological to a degree. For many consumers OpenAI, or at least ChatGPT was AI. The controversy was enough for folks to be introduced to competitors in the AI space and suddenly OpenAI's success felt a lot less inevitable.
I agree with OP though that this won't actually be the cause of OpenAI's downfall, should it happen. But I still think it's an interesting inflection point.
Anecdotally a whole lot more people around me started using Anthropic models in the last few weeks and seem to like them more than OpenAI. For many of these people it was the second provider they ever used.
Of course this is part of what has lead to such insane demand and outages they've experienced since then.
Sure. Neither OpenAI or Anthropic do. Amazon and Google have followed institutional investors bidding up Anthropic over OpenAI in private markets, all of which—I suspect—followed user-pattern shifts following the fiasco. (Well, fiascos. Altman is a host unto himself.)
"(And how competently Dario has played his hand.)"
lol hes barely done anything, but sometimes that is all that's necessary when a bozo opponent is hell-bent on screwing things up. He didn't get fired the first time for no reason.
> Is the simpler explanation that Alpha was already an investor
Individually, yes. Anthropic surging in private markets the weekend after the supply-chain risk designation, and raising from not only Google but also Amazon in such short clip (following credibly reports of it turning down $800+ billion valuation cheques from financial investors), all while OpenAI gets pilloried in the press and struggles to hold its $800bn valuation in private markets, collectively—to me—paints a bigger picture.
Can’t speak to citations, unfortunately, but if you have a banker or broker with secondary flow right now, ask them which they can get you more of and at what valuation: OpenAI or Anthropic.
Opposite of what you said. The "dig" was not retrenching to more use, but rather I evaluated what I saw them doing and have migrated our company to much better options.
I find it crazy that Google considers Anthropic to be worth almost 10% of Google itself (350B valuation mentioned in the article). Anthropic gets traction but has no moat, no infrastructure and relatively small team working for it. I feel for 40B you can get a lot of very smart people and a lot of very good hardware to outcompete it.
10B at their valuation from last November is an absolutely killer deal. If Anthropic had sufficient compute supply they could raise at 2x easily if not 3x.
Anthropic, meanwhile, is spending hundreds of millions buying customer commitments from PE firms to inflate that DAU number. They now have a larger war chest to spend on artificial user acquisition to further inflate that value for future funding rounds.
https://archive.ph/u274V
I think the subtext of the last few weeks is the Anthropic was becoming severely capacity constrained (or approaching that). They seem to have had to sign two somewhat adverse contracts with Amazon and Google in short succession. suddenly model quality is back up again.
That’s what’s needed when you go from $9B in ARR … to $30B in ARR literally just one quarter later.
That kind of insane growth & demand is unprecedented at that scale.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/google-broadcom-partnership-c...
What is all this AI doing? People are spending 10’s to 100’s of billions and no service or technology seems better or cheaper. Everything is more expensive and worse.
I'm burning an insane number of tokens 8-12 hours a day for the dramatic improvement of some internal tooling at a big tech company. Using it heavily for an unannounced future project as well.
I presume I'm not the only one.
We suddenly have a proliferation of new internal tools and resources, nearly all of which are barely functional and largely useless with no discernible impact on the overall business trajectory but sure do seem to help come promo time.
Barely an hour goes by without a new 4-page document about something that that everyone is apparently ment to read, digest and respond to, despite its author having done none of those steps, it's starting to feel actively adversarial.
I'm sorry to hear that you have people abusing their new superpowers.
I run a team and am spending my time/tokens on serious pain points.
Im convinced none of these people have any training in corporate finance. For if they did they'd realise they were wasting money.
I guess you gotta look busy. But the stick will come when the shareholders look at the income statement and ask... So I see an increase in operating expenses. Let me go calculate the ROIC. Hm its lower, what to do? Oh I know, lets fire the people who caused this (it wont be the C-Suite or management who takes the fall) lmao.
AI is truly perfect for internal tooling. Security is less or no concern, bugs are more acceptable, performance / scalability rarely a concern. Quickest way to get things done, and speed up production development, MVP development etc.
> Security is less or no concern
[waits for chickens to come home to roost]
I'd be interested to learn what kind of internal tooling are you improving ?
I’m not them but we have vastly improved our internal pipeline monitoring/triage/root cause/etc by having a new system that basically its whole purpose is to hook into all of our other systems and consolidate it under a single view with an emphasis on shortening the amount of time it takes to triage and refine issues.
This will have previously been too ambitious to ever scope but we’ve been able to build essentially all of it in just two months. Since it sits on top of our other systems and acts as more of a window/pass through control pane, the fact that it’s vibe coded poses little risk since we still have all the existing infrastructure under it if something goes awry.
We've had a lot of complaints about our review processes, time to submit, etc, and a lot of that boils down to tools no one has time to improve.
It's now trivial to fix these problems while still doing our day jobs -- shipping a product.
Personally, a static analysis PR check to catch some types of preventable runtime production errors in application code
Same and it is working really well (I say contra to most individual reporting).
I have some coworker who says something similar, he vibe coded tons of cryptic code, which indeed solves some problem though could be way more compact and well structured. Now it is hitting complexity limitation, since llm now cant comprehend it, and human cant comprehend it by large a margin.
honest recommendation: nuke and pave after analyzing (w/ AI of course) where it went horribly wrong.
it's trivial to reimplement a better solution.
Just wait a month, Opus 4.8 will comprehend it for sure.
Haven't you seen all the layoffs? Ive been subscribed to r/layoffs for 5+ years, and since a couple of months ago, it's been crazy noisy.
My hypothesis is that companies dont want to offer cheaper nor better services. Only want to cut costs and keep the revenue for investors.
I other news, TQQQ is pretty high!
Subscribers will not enable these companies to make their money back. The only way is for them to eat the economy itself
I'm wondering whether the layoffs are partly targeting people who haven't adapted to using AI tools, particularly those who are openly dismissive of AI-assisted work.
I'm spending a ton of tokens because it insists on manually correcting code that fails the linter, despite the instructions in the AGENTS.md to run the linter with autocorrect.
And also because the Plan agent generates a huge plan, asks me a couple yes/no questions with an obvious answer, and then regenerates the entire plan again. Then the Build agent gets confused anyway and does something else, and I have to round-trip about 5 times with that full context each time.
I keep seeing this take.
And yet.. building shit is no longer the sole domain of the software engineer.
That's the sea change.
I've literally had finance and GTM stand things up for themselves in the last few weeks. A few tweaks (obviously around security and access), and they are good to go.
They've gone from wrangling spreadsheets to smooth automated workflows that allow them to work at a higher level in a matter of months.
That's what all this AI is doing. The shit we could never get the time to get around to doing.
So... more 'busy work'.
The only thing that matters is the impact on the financials. The shareholders (the people who employ you) dont care about any of this if it does not enhance value.
Mind sharing what industry you’re seeing this in? I’ve never talked to finance or GTM as an engineer. I’m not sure GTM exists in my industry.
Run-rate revenue is not ARR. For all we know they could have a revenue of $100 and claim a run-rate revenue of $30B.
Given the fact that both Altman and Amodei are pathological liars, there's absolutely no reason to believe that Anthropic has $30B ARR.
the fact!?
I don't follow Anthropic enough to know what claims its CEO has made, but it is factual that Altman is a pathological liar. You can observe this for yourself by reading and listening to the things he says and then comparing them to reality. We have years of evidence to look back on. The chasm between Altman's reality and everyone else's is so large and so well-known that it was one of the chief factors cited by the board when he was fired.
(I would then argue that he was re-hired because others involved with OpenAI understood that it is literally his job to lie and that OpenAI would not be where it is today as a corporate behemoth rather than a research non-profit without a world-class liar marketing it, but that is merely conjecture.)
For all we know they could have a revenue of $100 and claim a run-rate revenue of $30B.
Can you explain how that’d work? What would the $30B figure be based on if they only have $100 in revenue?
If you make a hundred dollars in 0.1 seconds, you could say your annualized revenue is $100 / 0.1 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 365 = -$30 billion.
That said, most people would use a monthly or quarterly period to estimate ARR. I'm not sure what Anthropic used. Probably monthly.
As far as I understand run rate revenue is just a fancy way of saying that "the last month we had sales, and if that continues for a year we will have a AAR of 30B. meaning it's not 30B yet, but the sales numbers indicates that we get there by continue selling at the current speed. But to have revenue of $100 and get $30B in ARR I guess the period looked at needs to be seconds....
(Run Rate = Revenue in Period / # of Days in Period x 365)
They're pointing out that run-rate revenue is based on essentially sampling revenue over some limited time interval, then extrapolating from there assuming revenue always occurs at the same rate (or greater) over all similar intervals in the future. More specifically, they're pointing out that estimates of ARR derived from this kind of sampling are fundamentally prone to error and can be arbitrarily inflated based on how the time interval is sampled.
There are about 30 million seconds in a year. If they made $100 over the last hundred milliseconds, then that’s $30B annualized.
(That said, their numbers are much realer than that.)
It takes me 6 minutes minimum to get a response in the last 3 days, I don’t think model capacity is better.
Perhaps the adversity of the contracts cancels out with their sudden success and increase in valuation and it ends up a wash compared to the counterfactual scenario where they would have speculated on high growth early on.
Well to a certain extent it also blunts competition, Gemini is less of a threat if their main investor is also backing Anthropic. The issue is when the pyramid scheme collapses...
Both Amazon and Google provide the Claude models via their Kiro and Antigravity IDEs respectively. It could also be investing in their attempt to own the IDE space.
It feels like the market is full Wiley Coyote on frontier model makers, and I like Anthropic's B2B business model.
But all progress points to a commodification of foundation models--Google first named it as "we have no moat, neither does anyone else." So there must be some secondary play driving this, right? Hardware sales? Hedging for search ad revenue?
Still feels mispriced. I think asset inflation leaves too much money desperate for the Next Big Thing.
Google does have a sort of temporary moat. They have a much better hardware supply line story than anyone else and the revenue to maintain that edge indefinitely.
Running AI at a loss long enough to kill the competition would run afoul of antitrust laws. Even more so since they’re bundling their AI products with their search monopoly.
Although I doubt this will stop them if they think it’s advantageous…
Lower real operating costs isn't the same thing as below cost pricing.
US law here is nuanced. Good quick primer https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
I thought that these type of antitrust laws are in no way enforced anymore in the tech industry. And that it's been that way for decades. I mean the sheer existence of Google shows that right? What about Maps, Mail, Books... basically everything apart from Search? Why would an AI Mode as one category of Search results be any different? They're not actively promoting Gemini in those search results. They're simply augmenting it with this new tool that exists now.
Yes anti-trust is very much theatre nowadays.
As long it further's American interests globally - monopoly is fine. Other countries need to take notice and start picking winners nationally in order to compete with the large American big tech firms.
Eh, I think this is actually not a specifically American thing. More of a neo-liberal mindset. Competition may be good in the long term. But a monopoly now may mean more money in your pocket now. The tech giants definitely give the US some geo-political power in some cases but in general the US would be better off with more competition.
ed: @er2d, can't reply to your comment for some reason, so doing it here: I don't agree. In theory a monopoly decreases the necessity for R&D. Of course this becomes more complex if the R&D is funded or steered by the state. But look at the current state of LLMs. There is fierce competition between 3 US companies. But geopolitically it's the same as if there would be one monopoly. The US being the clear technological leader in an industry is not dependent on that industry being a domestic monopoly.
And for the Europe comment: Also don't agree. Look at Boeing & Airbus. Both are companies where the US & EU have decided that they need to ensure the existence of a domestic airplane manufacturer. So in these cases they support these companies (often in violation of international trade laws). But it has nothing to do with monopolies. If a state decides to support a company to ensure its existence, a monopoly is the logical consequence and not the aim. Because if that industry would be profitable it wouldn't need to be supported in the first place.
But all these tech companies are not in industries that would move off-shore or stop existing because they're not profitable enough, so it's an entirely different setting.
Nope the reason for a monopoly is incentives for R&D and innovation.
The US understands that and allows it to happen as the former yields a compounding effect of power.
European states certainly don't get this.
TSMC ?
Airbus ?
Are you claiming they are tech firms in the manner of a Apple, Google etc?
lol
> antitrust laws. Even more so since they’re bundling their AI products with their search monopoly.
couldn't this just be framed / spun as just using search data as training? i don't seem being bundled enough to run afoul with anti-trust.
> run afoul of antitrust laws
Now, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.
Who's going to enforce antitrust laws in this environment, pray tell?
> Running AI at a loss long enough to kill the competition would run afoul of antitrust laws.
Running at a loss long enough to kill the competition is basically the name of the game these days.
When Uber started, they were basically setting VC money on fire by selling rides at a loss to destroy the taxi market.
>would run afoul of antitrust laws
Buwahahahahahahahhahah
They drop a little cash on some shitcoin the president controls and those problems go away.
If AI is commoditising, who is Bahrain and who are the Saudis?
The company with the access to cheap and plentiful energy and the real estate to build data centers will be Saudi Arabia in your analogy.
This is why SpaceX could be a dark horse in this race. Putting compute in space is expensive but so is building a data center in the US.
> Putting compute in space is expensive but so is building a data center in the US.
You know what's also really hard in a vacuum? Dissipating heat.
> You know what's also really hard in a vacuum? Dissipating heat
Correct. The economics of space-based DCs basically comes down to permitting delays versus radiator mass. At ISS-weight radiators (10 to 15 W/kg), you need almost decade-long delays on the ground (or 10+ percent interest rates) to make lifting worthwhile. Get down to current state-of-the-art in the 5 to 10 W/kg range, however, and you only need permiting delays of 3 to 5 years.
If there is a game-changing start-up waiting to be built, it's in someone commercialising a better vacuum-rated radiator.
Would you want more wattage per kg for a better radiator?
What does that mean?
> What does that mean?
I really couldn't have been more obscure, could I? :P
In 1932, "the first oil field in the Persian Gulf outside of Iran" was discovered in Bahrain [1]. (The same year Saudi Arabia announced unification [2].)
In the end, Saudi Arabia had larger reserves and wound up geopolitically dominating its first-moving rival. In commodities, the game tends to be scale in part through land grabbing. Less who got where first.
To close the analogy, if AI does wind up commoditised, the layers at which that commodity is held are probably between power and compute [3]. So if AI commoditises (commodifies?), Google selling computer (and indirectly power) to Anthropic and OpenAI is the smarter play than trying to advantage Gemini. (If AI doesn't commoditise, the opposite may be true–Google is supercharging a competitor.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahrain_Petroleum_Company
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_of_the_Kingdom_of...
[3] The alternate hypothesis is it's at distribution.
I believe they were drawing a parallel to oil commoditization, but that's as far as I got.
The app layer is Bahrain.
I haven't thought about any secondary play, but if these companies converge on Google's TPUs, they would probably eagerly slice from NVIDIA's current market.
> In September 2025, Google is in talks with several "neoclouds," including Crusoe and CoreWeave, about deploying TPU in their datacenter. In November 2025, Meta is in talks with Google to deploy TPUs in its AI datacenters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_Processing_Unit
I keep getting notification from my tooling that gemini models are overloaded so we switched you to openai. So I feel google is not ready to sell tpu’s just yet.
YouTube is a kind of moat for Google.
"we have no moat, neither does anyone else." is just an employee's personal work blog
It feels like Anthropic is everybody's insurance policy against someone else winning the AI race. So you have Amazon, Google, Microsoft basically every major tech company pushing their own tech hard but simultaneously ensuring they have a survival level stake in Anthropic if they can't build or acquire their way to stay at frontier level performance themselves.
It is very difficult for me to see any amount of money being thrown at Anthropic as a bad idea.
The amount of new revenue that I am personally able to create for my clients, using Claude models for dev, and Claude models inside the insanely agile products delivered, is astounding.
If I was not currently experiencing this myself, and someone told me that this was possible, I would be calling them names.
You could say the same about Codex (and other tooling). Opus as a model is market leading (trading blows with the greatest that OpenAI is peddling), but there will be a reckoning when open weight models are good enough - and I'd argue we are almost there with some of the latest releases. If you hook up the latest OpenAI models to something like OpenCode, its a taste of what an open harness with a powerful model (outside of a providers ecosystem) will be able to offer developers in the future.
I know there are multiple paths at this, thank the computing gods.
If we get to an end-state of monopoly/duopoly at this game, then we are truly screwed.
I was just stating my current use and revenue path. Anthropic has insane velocity, in April of 2026.
I consider them competitors… This reminds me of Microsoft in 1997 investing $150 million in Apple, saving it from near bankruptcy
googles multiple businesses and gemini isn't the largest one.
anthropic is the anchor external customer of tpu's and nvidia is worth more than all of google. If tpu's actually breakout as a viable alternative over the next few years for multiple clients the business could easily be worth as much as search, maybe more.
> If tpu's actually breakout as a viable alternative over the next few years
Why haven't they broken out yet, I wonder, if they're more efficient for inference and LLM costs are now weighted towards inference over training?
You essentially have to run in google to use them and that probably limits their ability to breakout. Anthropic might be doing this deal as a way to shore up their supply chain and cost of both inference and training by leveraging Google's hardware and chip manufacturing expertise.
Several customers like Citadel, run TPUs in their own datacenters (closer to Exchanges)
every tpu thats been made is in use and sold at a high margin, demand is not the issue.
there are literally not enough tpu's on earth for them to break out, every tpu thats been made is in use, the spike in demand is recent and google has heavy competition for foundry space.
Possibly because they just haven't been able to manufacture enough of them yet to be a viable business to others? They're fighting everyone else for foundry space and time.
> Microsoft in 1997 investing $150 million in Apple, saving it from near bankruptcy.
If only Apple could pass the favor forward. But no, they can't be bothered to invest even a single million in Asashi Linux to benefit their own hardware.
If I remember correctly, Microsoft allegedly did that for the very selfish reason of looking better in terms of being a monopoly.
Of course this is well known. Everything Microsoft does is for selfish capitalist reasons and everything Apple does is for altruistic philanthropic reasons.
Rather than for the altruistic reason of saving a struggling fellow company?
Google is right (I think) to invest in winning compute share from Nvidia over winning token share from other frontier model builders.
They are, but Google Vertex has been one of the official ways to use Claude since forever.
They already had a non trivial stake in Anthropic though?
It just keeps the lights on for the whole industry.
The tech is great but valuations are out of control. It's cheaper to keep valuations high through these circular financing deals, rather than to allow for any deflation.
Anthropics erratic behavior is going to get Google regulated. This is "don't rock the boat" money. Google existentially needs AI for advertising.
That was precisely my thought on seeing the news. I did not know about Google's existing entanglements with anthropic, but it seemed like a clear message - Do not panic on the money, do the work.
> Google existentially needs AI for advertising.
What's the explanation behind this? I am sure they use AI in their ad network (matching web sites with ad offerings, maybe generating ads automatically), but is there more to it?
I know AI companies are selling ad training into the models so the models know about your product. I'm not sure if that is what they were referring to, but it could be related.
My opinion about this is that Google see it as a way to weaken OpenAI, and few other side benefits, including the option to acquire Anthropic.
And it may very well be bad news for OpenAI.
That boat has sailed off. Not even Google has the cash to buy a company valued at almost a trillion dollars.
Valued at a trillion by basically, no one who would actually invest anywhere close to that
Maybe, I think there is a lot of uncertainty about valuations of AI labs in the near to medium future.
OpenAI crashing would be good news and bad news for Anthropic investors.
Anyone else has an increasing feeling that all the AI hype is turning into a "Dot-Com Bubble x 2008 Credit Default Swaps" collab?
I think a lot of people suspect that, but no one is able to help themselves. Manias are a feature/bug of humanity.
It's an actual bubble specific to AI. This investment is just another example of the bubble. Pre-2008, all the investment would be coming from banks. Post-2008, all the investment came from VCs... but VCs got tapped out, so AI companies went to bigger private capital. They tapped out all the private capital. So now they're making the rounds, making deals with any corporations left with tens/hundreds of billions in cash, because they're the only possible investors left. When all of them are tapped out, and without a release of pressure from the hardware market, the only investor left will be the government. After that it's kaplooie.
You'll notice that all the really big deals have fallen through, because they're based on promises and meeting objectives that can't be met. So it's likely that there will be really big writeoffs but not a huge implosion like 2001/2008. The real losers will be the retail investors who put all their money in a handful of stocks at ridiculous valuations.
Which big deals have fallen through?
x oil shock (due to Ormuz).
If you added up all the major AI valuations, it's apparently worth more than products Americans constantly buy and rely on for their main life. So either AI is going to be involved in every Americans life to a large degree, and paying real money for, or these valuations are insanely wrong.
> it's apparently worth more than products Americans constantly buy and rely on for their main life
What are you counting in this category?
There are countless examples, but let's say Ford. Worth $150 billion, $50 billion not counting debt.
My neighbors just gave Ford $60k. It'll be a while until my neighbor gives Anthropic $60k.
Valuations are based on future expected earnings, not revenue. It cost Ford a lot of money to make that $60k car. The margins for AI companies are unknown but the market is pricing that they’ll be higher at one point. Not that they’ll attract more revenue from the average person.
> My neighbors just gave Ford $60k. It'll be a while until my neighbor gives Anthropic $60k.
How much of that 60K does Ford actually keep? And how much will it be once BYD is allowed in the US? The forecast for Ford is pretty much only downwards, the possible upside on AI is huge.
If every company in the F500 starts spending $2000+ on AI credits per employee, then every consumer product will indirectly be funding AI companies. I think it's already the case that companies small enough to avoid/skip getting O365 or Google Suite subscriptions will pay for AI first.
I guess I’m not surprised that if one “added up all the major AI valuations,” it’s more than any single consumer purchase or even most single companies.
Did you add Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon in that because more people consume from these firms than Ford
His neighbour isn't spending $60,000 on all of those together
Count the Fords on the street.
Now count the Amazon deliveries in a year on said same street. And next year, and the year after, and.. however long one keeps a Ford these days..
It's quite a scary thought exercise.
At 20 year depreciation it’s $250 a month. Close to Anthropic’s $200 model. IMHO at this point a lot of developers would rather walk than code manually.
Yeah, but $200 a month is not a sustainable price.
I'm not sure exactly what kind of point you are making but the valuations are at least nominally based on the expected value of the business far into the future and aren't comparable to, say, purchases done over a year despite both being denoted in dollars.
Stocks vs Flows! You can't compare (as in subtract and check sign) $ and $/s!
>> $10 billion now ... another $30 billion to follow if Anthropic hits certain performance targets...
Hopefully this money means more compute infrastructure to help Anthropic counter the efficiency changes that have created this perceived downtrend in claude quality.
The puzzling thing is why Google would try to help with that. Aren't they competitors? Wouldn't they want their competitor to have problems?
It's more understanding for Amazon or Microsoft to make such an investment, because they're not as competitive in the model space.
There's always three:
And then hopefully some open source models save us from this nightmare before China commadatises everything.Edit: I forgot Amazon. Who knows what they will do. They're the wildcard anyway.
OpenAI buying Microsoft.. I honestly think I'd like to see that.
Anything to invigorate the desktop.
Microsoft buying OpenAI.. 10 minutes later it's rebranded Copilot.. and.. nothing much changes in the world. Oh, except all the AI improvements are around Enterprise governance.
Google owned 14ish percent of Anthropic before this investment, so presumably this could bring it up to as much as 25%?
Deepmind is heavily using Claude. This could help secure computing power.
I'm not up to date, I think. How so?
Google was already an investor in Anthropic but I don’t think they are truly competitors in this space.
What if Google can't compete? They don't want to be left behind and all this money being throw around is just nonsense anyway.
> the efficiency changes that have created this perceived downtrend in claude quality”
Why the euphemism? What Anthropic did was an aggressive degradation of their model to save compute, and it's not just “perceived downtrend”, Anthropic themselves have acknowledged the quality of service degradation.
At this point if you have cash or compute credits laying around in the tens of billions, better to hedge your bets than to find out the winner that took all was not you.
Unless none of the current crop of AI companies is “the winner,” either because a newcomer appears or the craze fizzles… in which case have $40B in the bank seems superior.
$40B. Numbers mean nothing anymore
yep, you know what's better than billions? trillions.
Yes, and it's incredibly wasteful.
Yup. You can actually buy several European airlines with that kind of money.
For example, you can buy KLM Air france for less than $3B.
It is a profitable business that does $30B in sales and $1B in profit. (and has been profitable since for the past 4-5 years)
"$30B in sales and $1B in profit."
This margin seems terrible.
A 10B insurance policy on google’s business sounds like a bargain?
And with cashback through gcp usage!
They just announced their new chip, and they are the ones created transformers yet investing this amount in a competitor?
I don’t know what to make of it
Why do you think Google considers Anthropic a competitor?
I wonder if Google regrets publishing that article on transformers.
Urs used to talk (internally) about not publishing "industry-enabling papers" which is why most Google infrastructure papers were describing something that had already been turned off, or was already in the process of being replaced by the next system (GFS, Vitess, etc). The things that did get published were either considered not key advantages, that other companies simply cannot do, things that other companies wouldn't bother doing, or experiments that never worked at all. There were exceptions of course. But it led to a public perception of the Google stack involving mostly technologies that were long dead or were never adopted.
"Attention Is All You Need" was a very very different thing and I also wonder if they are glad they published it. But I imagine if they hadn't, the motivation for researchers to leave Google would have been even larger.
Given that anthropic is probably paying it all back to them in compute bills, they may not be giving them anything.
It makes every bit as much sense as investing in Snap while still operating their own social network product. Seems to have worked out fine (for Google, not Snap).
Google seems to own a bit of everyone.
you might even say they own the whole alphabet at this point
my take is Anthropic needs a large cash infusion since it's the one of the popular model providers.
if it runs of out of cash - then it's bad for the whole industry.
same as OpenAI. so all players - will provide cash & compute to keep them going.
They need compute
> if it runs of out of cash - then it's bad for the whole industry.
Why? I don’t think we would suffer if anthropic disappeared tomorrow
If Anthropic disappeared tomorrow due to running out of cash it would cause a great panic, no?
Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Meta, Nvidia. All their stock gains in the last 2 or so years were because of the AI hype. And who knows how much money the borrowed and promises they made on the assumption that their stock will continue to rise in the same pace for years to come. When one domino falls, they will follow. So they have every incentive to keep the music going for one of their "friends".
So $40B in google cloud credits in return for % in equity.
Didn't Amazon AWS do the same recently?
Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47848276
I wonder what happens to the “Gemini enterprise”. Will it do a Google plus or Google wave ?
It's a little weird. I work for Google, but I spend way more time helping get Anthropic serving and running than anything to do with Gemini.
That's b/c the people working on Gemini serving are in GDM.
This is a good strategy. Internal competition between Gemini and GCP.
Cool. Will they use their balance sheets to pour all of this cash or are they going to bring the banking system to its knees and then we bail out everyone again ?
"The Alphabet subsidiary is committing to invest $10 billion now, at a $350 billion valuation for Anthropic, with another $30 billion to follow if Anthropic hits certain performance targets, according to Anthropic."
this is insane. on the secondary market the valuation is 2-3x that. what gives?
Anthropic raised $30 billion at a $350 billion valuation (pre-money) in February.
Google's deal from prior rounds likely lets them buy in at the same valuation other investors get every round, so they're just getting the February valuation.
Amazon did almost the same thing last week, at the same valuation.
Googles giving them something thats a lot more scares to them then dollars, large volumes of chips quickly.
If you gave anthropic 10b cash they couldn't get chips in the 0-6mo timeframe at scale. Anthropic is suffering reputational damage due to choices they have to make around capacity constraints.
Google, AWS, and Azure are the only people who can help them so they hold the cards, thus the good terms.
Top of the book? Nobody on the secondary market is investing $30bn
> Nobody on the secondary market is investing $30bn
Correct. But I think $5 to 10bn are sitting ready for $700 to 800, which strongly implies Google is getting a solid deal on this.
The GOOG and AMZN deals announced earlier this week would be considered part of the same Feb'26 round. I.e. it would have the same seniority rights as that round.
It is not uncommon to keep a round open after the formal announcement for a bit so that few investors who could not close for whatever reason are part of it. It can be hard to line up everyone at the same time, especially when they are public companies.
---
Specific to your point on why valuation can be lower than market at the same time - Goods(and stocks) while feel to be homogeneous, divisible, fungible, they are not. Size can value of its own.
A block of 10% shares may be worth more (or less) than unit share price, because them being available together has a property of its own, making it either more desirable when someone wants to acquire or harder to sell because there is not enough demand if all of them get dumped at the same time [1]
In this deal terms, just cause few ten millions are trading at $850B, or some investors can put in say $1-2B doesn't mean you can raise $40B at the same valuation.
There isn't depth in the market to raise $65B (including the AMZN deal) at $850B valuation. There is always some demand at any price point in the demand supply curve, you will probably find few people who will buy few shares at $10T, or $100T or some ridiculous number but that doesn't mean you can raise a large round on that.
Strictly speaking it is not even $350B per se, i.e. Google and AWS benefit from this as vendors. It very much like vendor financing with convertible debt. Meaning it is worth that much to them, but not to you and me because we are not getting some of the money back as sales that boosts are own stock.
---
[1] In the same vein, price can also depend on what you are getting in return, hard immediate dollars is the highest value. However if you are getting shares in return, you can usually negotiate a premium depending on risk of the shares you are getting.
The recent SpaceX - Cursor deal is a good example, any founder would likely take say $10B all cash offer over the $60B from SpaceX, or price would be closer to cash if it GOOG, AMZN, APPL shares instead - proven deeply liquid market etc.
That's the last round they raised at. They had other offers from VCs at ~850B they rejected. Seems like may have been in works since that last round was being raised and just finished paperwork?
It’s pretty wild how badly Altman siding with Hegseth has backfired. (And how competently Dario has played his hand.)
I don’t think that’s the ultimate cause of the turnaround in fortunes. But it strikes me, at least from the investor and potentially urban-consumer perspectives, as a pivotal moment in both companies’ fortunes.
What backfired?
Ant's recent rise has little to none to do with retail subscribers, it is Claude Code with Opus 4.5+, followed by their Mythos stunt
I would say the flood of $20 Claude Subscribers due to news cycle backfired on them, now everyone is getting worse outputs and exposed their shortage on compute, which they can't fix anytime soon.
Pretty much everyone I know has both cc and codex now, just because how unreliable cc has become.
> would say the flood of 20+ Claude Subscribers due to news cycle backfired
This is a good hypothesis. I suspect we are both correct.
The PR boost from Anthropic standing its ground drove signups. That, in turn, drove investors. But the users also drove utilization, which degraded quality across the board.
My hypothesis rests on Anthropic’s user mix having significantly shifted to consumers (versus enterprise) after the mix-up. Whenever we get public numbers it would be interesting to test that.
> What backfired?
I think it was psychological to a degree. For many consumers OpenAI, or at least ChatGPT was AI. The controversy was enough for folks to be introduced to competitors in the AI space and suddenly OpenAI's success felt a lot less inevitable.
I agree with OP though that this won't actually be the cause of OpenAI's downfall, should it happen. But I still think it's an interesting inflection point.
> introduced to competitors in the AI space and suddenly OpenAI's success felt a lot less inevitable.
This is true. OpenAI WAS the story of AI, now it is just 50% of it, at max. Losing the monopoly of imagination towards AGI is bad for them.
One thing I don't agree though, consumers aren't the important part of AI, they are a liability.
AI is too expensive, consumers can't pay for it. Instead they will compete with enterprise for the same tokens, with less money.
> controversy was enough for folks to be introduced to competitors
This is my suspicion. Consumers hadn’t previously heard of Anthropic and Claude. Now they had, particularly in cities.
> this won't actually be the cause of OpenAI's downfall, should it happen. But I still think it's an interesting inflection point
Also agree. Hence why I said “I don’t think” the fight is “the ultimate cause.”
Anecdotally a whole lot more people around me started using Anthropic models in the last few weeks and seem to like them more than OpenAI. For many of these people it was the second provider they ever used.
Of course this is part of what has lead to such insane demand and outages they've experienced since then.
I use both CC and Codex because one is not enough and 5x for $100 is too much.
>> followed by their Mythos stunt
"Stunt", eh?
Alphabet makes $30 billion profit per quarter.
> Alphabet makes $30 billion profit per quarter
Sure. Neither OpenAI or Anthropic do. Amazon and Google have followed institutional investors bidding up Anthropic over OpenAI in private markets, all of which—I suspect—followed user-pattern shifts following the fiasco. (Well, fiascos. Altman is a host unto himself.)
Which means they can allow themselves to blast money left and right? Its still a big investment.
they can't allow themselves NOT to blast money left and right
Yes
No, they have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to not make obviously bad investments.
"(And how competently Dario has played his hand.)"
lol hes barely done anything, but sometimes that is all that's necessary when a bozo opponent is hell-bent on screwing things up. He didn't get fired the first time for no reason.
Is the simpler explanation that Alpha was already an investor and Anthropic has been making strides in their business model?
> Is the simpler explanation that Alpha was already an investor
Individually, yes. Anthropic surging in private markets the weekend after the supply-chain risk designation, and raising from not only Google but also Amazon in such short clip (following credibly reports of it turning down $800+ billion valuation cheques from financial investors), all while OpenAI gets pilloried in the press and struggles to hold its $800bn valuation in private markets, collectively—to me—paints a bigger picture.
Please share how OpenAI is struggling in the private markets.
There is more supply than demand flat to OpenAI’s recent raise. That’s simply not the case for Anthropic, at last raise or at comparable valuations.
Citation? Were you working on the deal?
Can’t speak to citations, unfortunately, but if you have a banker or broker with secondary flow right now, ask them which they can get you more of and at what valuation: OpenAI or Anthropic.
It was enough for me to dig much deeper into OpenAI, where before we almost exclusively used them for services with any form of SLA.
You're saying it was a turning point for you to get more embedded with them? Way to be killer robot positive, I guess...
Good call out because I was a little unclear.
Opposite of what you said. The "dig" was not retrenching to more use, but rather I evaluated what I saw them doing and have migrated our company to much better options.
I find it crazy that Google considers Anthropic to be worth almost 10% of Google itself (350B valuation mentioned in the article). Anthropic gets traction but has no moat, no infrastructure and relatively small team working for it. I feel for 40B you can get a lot of very smart people and a lot of very good hardware to outcompete it.
the moat is the tool itself. You understand this after you start using it.
25% ;)
10B at their valuation from last November is an absolutely killer deal. If Anthropic had sufficient compute supply they could raise at 2x easily if not 3x.
They need it to fend off Crabby Rathbun from watching YouTube videos and commenting. The paperclip race is on, and we must win it!
Anthropic, meanwhile, is spending hundreds of millions buying customer commitments from PE firms to inflate that DAU number. They now have a larger war chest to spend on artificial user acquisition to further inflate that value for future funding rounds.