Anthropic’s revenue run rate hit $30 billion this month. Brad Gerstner reported the company added more in March than Databricks and Palantir’s combined annual revenue. David Sacks argues this justifies the industry’s massive data center bets. The bubble narrative died.
The company’s newfound scale is paired with a gatekeeping strategy. Anthropic restricted its ‘Mythos’ model to 40 companies through Project Glasswing for a 100-day security review. The model reportedly found a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD and a 16-year-old flaw in FFMPEG missed by millions of automated scans. Brett Winton at ARK Invest calls the delay a marketing tactic. He notes many of the same exploits are detectable by GPT-4. The safety narrative papers over compute shortages and creates a premium market for the cure.
“The logic is simple: tell the world a tool is too dangerous for general release, then charge a premium for the cure.”
- Brett Winton, FYI - For Your Innovation
Chamath Palihapitiya dismisses the threat as theater. He argues sophisticated hackers can already use existing models like Opus to achieve similar results. David Sacks grants the cyber risk is legitimate but notes Anthropic has a pattern of coupling product releases with scare tactics, citing a 2024 blackmail study they prompted over 200 times to get a desired result.
The company’s commercial moves are aggressive. Days before launching its own ‘managed agents,’ Anthropic forced the open-source project OpenClaw off flat-rate subscriptions onto expensive metered APIs. Jason Calacanis views this as an anti-competitive move to ankle the leading open-source agent project. He predicts open-source agents will capture 90% of token usage and undercut proprietary models.
“Anthropic effectively ‘ankled’ OpenClaw, the most successful open-source agent project on GitHub.”
- David Sacks, All-In
The corporate panic is real. Treasury Secretary Bessent and Fed Chair Powell summoned bank CEOs for an emergency meeting last week citing the Mythos threat. Marty Bent suggests this was a red herring. The real topic was likely the $1 trillion hole in the private credit market, where insurance companies face a liquidity crisis worse than 2008.
The market is now a game of musical chairs played with H100 GPUs. Brett Winton says compute determines market share. OpenAI holds a hardware advantage and can release models broadly. Anthropic’s throttled access forces users to try competitors. Meta looms as a formidable competitor because its advertising business lets it deliver consumer AI without directly monetizing the model.
The Mythos saga reveals the new rules. Superior product matters, but controlling the compute supply to fulfill demand matters more. Revenue is a tool to secure future silicon. Anthropic’s play isn't about safety. It's about securing a seat at the table.
