There is no panic, it's misreporting and bad journalism. 2025 AI budgets were based on 2025 AI capabilities, and let's face it, LLMs only got acceptable in around November 2025. So it's natural usage went up and budgets didn't account for that.

Right but that kinda like just happened. The market hasn't fully reacted to it yet, so it's hard to say that now is the moment when it's safe to draw a linear extrapolation.

As that sort of person myself, albeit not in a software company right now, my thought process would be this.

1) I have a new extra cost 2) How does that make me more profit, and improved cashflow

I know I'll be bombarded with metrics about productivity, feature completion, bug fixes etc. But someone is going to have to tell me how that equates to more sales. And who is going to do that? I'll be worried that the feature wishlist will just creep up now we can handle more throughput, and yet everyone will be telling me that I don't need to worry about the lack of new customers this quarter, one more new feature and we will catch up in Q4. You can see how that could make one grumpy. Then when the sales don't come, I'll tell the CTO that they need to balance the books, if they want to use expensive tools to make each developer more productive then they will need fewer developers...

...but I don't want that, I want more great features that people will pay for, and faster. But they have to pay for themselves.

As Anthropic with all its revenue still needs a large outside capital, it suggests that those AI costs those CFOs pay probably don't cover the actual Anthropic's costs.

You’d be surprised how much vibe is there in VC investing.

When one is under the grip of irrational exuberance and FOMO due diligence goes out the window.

For example look at Sequoia’s investment into FTX and article about Sam that accompanied.

I seriously doubt that anyone is doing much of a due diligence here. They are either counting on others to do it and just follow along OR investing some more money to keep this thing alive enough to go through the IPO.

ARR seems like a interesting concept which hides away the concrete details and is counting on a futuristic possible commitment especially for companies at this early stages. The crucial detail is probably the money being spent, that is what is fueling this sale of equity at this point.

WeWork, Theranos, FTX

They get in now because they want a high IPO exit. They care about the perception of the numbers, not about reality.

If you think investment banks will catch them during the IPO: They have launched many overpriced IPOs in 1999/2000 and also want a high IPO price.

That's basically how 2008 happened

Investors made bad decisions all the time. The proof is in revenue.

I used to think this too. Now I know different.

After cases like Madoff, Theranos, and FTX … I don’t know about that.

Market crashes like the dotcom bust, and countless companies stock rising to high heavens to crash a few months after IPO to shit say otherwise. VALinux was a poster child for investment... lol

Not to mention even a total shitshow from an obvious crackpot like Theranos got $1.2 billion total funding, and a 9B valuation. Or FTX.

There are plenty of examples of investors going off of vibes: Theranos, Juicero, WeWork. Though Anthropic would be a particularly egregious example if it does end up failing.

Investors would never give billions of dollars to liars

more than likely what he meant is their metrics may be non-GAAP.

And the punishment for securities fraud is a slap on the wrist, as Tesla proved with its "going private at $420/share, funding secured" tweet. Who cares about a $40m fine from an increasingly toothless regulator when your investors have already fronted $1.5 billion to settle copyright infringement claims?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y4jpg922qo

> (Also in Axios today is an anonymously sourced note that "An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees" - times that by 12 and you get an extra $6 billion in annualized run-rate!)

This one client, then, is 12.8% of Anthropic's run-rate revenue? That does not exactly fill me with confidence that it's a meaningful number. Doesn't this suggest run-rate revenue will fall off a cliff if Anthropic customers start applying cost controls?

In 2026 what really even is financial crime, other than failing to grease the right palms?

Private companies are not obligated to report GAAP numbers which means they can creatively twist numbers while still be truthful until they go public

You need to think about this more creatively.

What we are talking about is entirely based on this one term in the announcement: run-rate revenue. This is a meaningless term just like how “clinically proven” for vitamins is a way for the companies to use weasel words to imply something without truly being able to back it up, but also not actually lying. There is no legal definition of “clinically proven” so, what exactly would you sue them for? The same thing is true for run-rate revenue. They can cherry pick numbers to use to generate the run-rate revenue value and they are not lying, but this isn’t exactly honest either. We have no transparency and run-rate revenue is not an accounting term.

This goes back to my entire point, this is a vibe. This announcement does not provide much in the way of substance, so a reader will take it to say whatever they want.

Are you familiar with Elon Musk's endless, repeated and obvious lies for the last decade?

> How are they “not obligated to be truthful”? Lying to investors is literally a crime.

In the US?

Hahaha, that was a good one, buddy.

having a trillion dollars that need 5x payment un 5 years is insane promise by anything but government.

like when you owe a bank a billion dollars, thats the banks problem.

I'm also thinking the same.

I have been trying Claude Code with DeepSeek 4 apis, and the experience is barely different. In fact the margin of error is so small that harness and prompting account for the most impact in output quality.

But, here's the catch: I spend barely more than a handful of dollars per day of regular usage. In fact DS4 via api is cheaper than Claude 100$ subscription.

I really think that very soon many will start realizing that the alternatives are extremely close in performance but dramatically different in pricing.

I remember seeing a video about this subject, since large IPOs are automatically included in index funds it is kinda of a way to extract value from passive investors. Insiders cash out before it hits the indexes, index crashes by a fraction for a %, all pensions in the country (and many overseas) pay for it.

But with OpenAI and SpaceX IPOing roughly at the same time it will likely be more than fraction of a % in this/next year.

sure, but does that risk have good returns to go along? if IPOs are known to be very bad bets why do institutions (supposedly savvy professional investors) participate?

Index funds are market cap weighted. As companies fail, as they always do (median lifespan of S&P companies is about 15 years), you have less of it.

Tesla is 1.75% of Vanguard SP500 index. It could go to zero and most investors wouldn’t notice.

I think this is usually the case for most IPOs, insiders cash out, index-funds buy in. Basically it is a one-time technique for investors to extract money from pensions.

If you try to configure the index-fund to avoid this problem it is not longer passively managed as each new stock needs to be evaluated in a (at least) semi-subjective manner.

The critical view is that these IPOs are bumping up against physics. How many trillion dollar companies can the economy support? The US GDP is roughly 32 Trillion. A company with 100 billion dollars in revenue and 10x annual growth would be expected to increase the size of the economy by 3.2% in its first year, and about 30% in it's second year post IPO existing.

While we could claim that such a company can grow by consuming a larger share of the GDP ... this would not bode well for future political stability, and nationalization would be a major topic.

So your left with a fast take off scenario, a job apocalypse, or a massively reduced growth rate.

Sometimes when things change in an insidious manner, it’s hard to point out _when_ the decline started.

Few Pheonix(s) rise from the ashes of many Unicorns.

For Anthropic in particular, that we're talking about, API token costs are revenue that is earned in real-time not on a contract - so hypothetically a giant spike in token use on an API use contract could spike revenue. But I don't think most expect that to randomly fluctuate enough to be material.

OpenAI is as open as Anthropic is anthropic.

> The branding of Claude is so much stronger than ChatGPT.

Absolutely not, you live in a bubble. Everybody knows about ChatGPT.

Few non-programmers have heard of anthropic or claude, nor do they care. But they all know what ChatGPT is.

for normies it is the exact opposite.

They know that "claude's the good one"

They certainly know claude. I keep telling them they are all about the same.

They know the cool kids have ditched OpenAI and now use Claude

Of course not. Normal people are using gemini, it comes pre-installed on Android now.

Ironically their tussle with the US federal government is what made them a household name [1]

There's no better way to create awareness of a brand than to get it featured in the most popular reality TV show globally at the moment: "Thing Trump Did: Season 2."

[1] Proof: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=... (see the massive spike in January of this year)

There is no conclusion , I only stated the only objective fact to compare with that will not change for you to me.

Everything else is subjective to your setup, use case, configuration tuning and so forth.

More importantly bean-counters and decision makers at even 150+ seat orgs are looking at pricing sheets and enterprise contracts not how it performs for some team in a specific harness today to make million dollar annual contracts. It is not common for procurement teams to do commission the level of detailed analysis or large scale pilots that will actually hold for the duration of contract.

That doesn't mean that GPT-5.5 is selling less than Claude at all, just that cost is not the primary driver if list price is not cheaper, there is reason these are published in the same format by every vendor, because the common metric is how finance likes to compare with.

You can configure model to be terse/concise with output style ? There are plenty of popular projects like https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman which do it for you even.

Input/Cache/Output ratios are use case and configuration dependent . Any benefits in one model can usually be roughly to another with configuration tuning, and discussions devolve into subjective experience.

Pricing sheet is the objective way to compare cost.

We are still in the short-half-life phase of GPUs. If a 2x faster GPU is on the horizon, why wouldn't OpenAI already be in line to buy? They aren't buying just 1, they are buying multiple datacenters' worth. So they wouldn't be a low priority, back of the line customer.

A short half-life means you are going to quickly dispose of what you have now, anyway. In fact most current datacenters can't even handle Vera Rubin, so I don't think there's short term risk here.

You have missed the point

Nvidia has probably monopolized several upstream supplies to manufacture critical chip components for next 2 years, the HBMs and Optics component from LITE, as well as TSM capacity. Let alone those power components they funded themselves.

Let's say you have a genius design, but you will have it close to impossible to compete with Nvidia in getting it to volumes.

Jensen is a player, he isn't fooling around with all these Asian trips just to wine and dine

Google needs to catch up on what? Devs mindshare? The latest Opus 4.8 carefully selected benchmarks made sure to pick Gemini 3.1 Pro and not Gemini 3.5 Flash: 3.5 Flash is beating Opus 4.8 on several of the benchmarks Anthropic posted but simply was ignored.

I don't think SOTA-wise Google has a lot of catch up to do.

A series "H" for $65 billion and no path to profitability is existing fine?

In terms of personal assistant AI the monopolists have a massive advantage because they control the platforms and can box out competitors from deeply integrating with the OS.

That feels really hard to argue now that Anthropic/OpenAI are so much bigger

How the hell do you crush a ~1T company on the one thing they have all their focus on?

I just finished talking to a dev manager friend of mine at a household name company.

He told me they are massively pulling back on the AI stuff.

Right now the lashback is about cost, because that's the most easily measured pain point.

Soon, we'll start seeing a deeper understanding of the quality issues. At that point, it's likely this whole experiment gets firmly put in a bin of the toolbox where it belongs.

> at some point companies will realize tokenmaxxing is not good

Why? Have we figured out the limits of what agents can do?

> OpenAI is much less exposed to tokenmaxxing

I don't think this is true, from my own experience & chatting with my acquaintances.

Going off the other reply, I wonder if a highly-active secondary market means that companies can raise series [A-Z]+ rounds effectively forever, where each "round" just refers to a giant purchase of shares under strict company supervision. Is this the new game for startups?

Correct. There is also a secondary market.

Outside of big tech, it's also fairly common for private companies to simply not offer equity to employees.

What happens when you make it to Z do they then start doing Z1 rounds or does it reset to AA like excel (though that would be confusing)? Hex?

AGI in the next 20 years is more likely than all the roads in my country getting fixed anytime in the future.

give a bot a vote