This is a fragment Sources: Alex Heatha newsletter about artificial intelligence and the tech industry, distributed once a week only to The Verge subscribers.
On Wednesday, Dario Amodei took the stage at the DealBook Summit to throw punches without naming names.
Anthropic’s CEO spent much of the interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin carefully drawing the line between his company’s approach and that of a certain competitor. When asked whether the AI industry is in a bubble, Amodei separated the “technology side” from the “economic side” and then twisted the knife.
“Technically, I feel really solid,” he said. “On the economics side, I have concerns that even if the technology delivers on all of its promises, I think there are players in the ecosystem that if they just get the timing wrong, just mistime it a little bit, bad things could happen.”
Who could these players be? Despite Sorkin’s insistence, Amodei did not name OpenAI or Sam Altman. But he didn’t have to.
“There are players who do YOLO,” he said. “Let’s say you’re a person who just kind of wants things YOLO or just likes big numbers, then you might turn the dial too far.”
He also touched on the issue of “circular deals,” in which chip suppliers such as Nvidia invest in artificial intelligence companies, which then spend the funds on their chips. Amodei acknowledged that Anthropic has made some of these deals, although “not on the scale of some other players,” and provided calculations on how they can operate responsibly: Building a fresh gigawatt data center costs about $10 billion over five years. The provider invests upfront, and the AI startup pays back its share of the deal as revenue grows.
Although he again did not name names, he did refer to the impressive numbers that OpenAI is talking about in connection with the development of its calculations. “I don’t actually think there’s anything wrong with it,” he said. “Now, if you start stacking them up and they grow to huge amounts and you say, ‘I need to be making $200 billion a year by 2027 or 2028,’ then yes, you can overdo it.”
At the heart of Amodea’s argument was a concept he used internally: the “cone of uncertainty.”
He said Anthropic’s revenues have grown tenfold annually for three years, going from zero to $100 million in 2023, $100 million to $1 billion in 2024, and now ranging from $8 billion to $10 billion by the end of this year. (For comparison, Sam Altman he said OpenAI expects to end 2025 with an annual revenue rate of more than $20 billion.) But even Amodei doesn’t know whether Anthropic will hit $20 billion or $50 billion next year. “It’s very uncertain.”
He explained that this uncertainty is concerning because data centers take one to two years to build. Decisions on computing needs for 2027 need to be made now. Buy too little and you will lose customers to your competitors. Buy too much and you risk bankruptcy. Amodei added: “How much buffer is in that cone basically depends on my margins.”
“We want to buy enough to be confident even in a 10th percentile scenario,” he said. “There is always tail risk. But we try to manage that risk well. ” He considered Anthropic’s enterprise-focused business, with its higher margins and more predictable revenues, to be structurally safer than its consumer-focused business. “We don’t have to do any red codes.”