Anthropic’s growth faces a spending-control test

Enterprise (9)

• Ara Kurazzian says Ramp's payment data covers more than 80,000 businesses and over $275 billion in annual business spend, but skews toward tech-forward companies likely to adopt AI early.
• Ara Kurazzian says AI has been Ramp's fastest-growing tracked spending category over the past two years. Anthropic has become the most popular AI model among businesses, while competition now includes OpenAI, xAI, and Meta.
• Ara Kurazzian says AI spending is highly concentrated: the top 1% of businesses account for 80% of it. Ramp's median AI spender pays about $15 per employee monthly, up from roughly $12 a month earlier.
• Ara Kurazzian says the top 10% of firms still increase AI spend, while the top 1% have slowed from earlier hypergrowth. Top 1% firms spend roughly $7,000 to $10,000 per employee monthly, even as token use continues to rise.
• Ara Kurazzian attributes slower spending growth partly to falling prices and better efficiency: AI prices fell nearly half over the observed period, allowing firms to use more tokens without equivalent spending growth.
• Ara Kurazzian says advanced adopters are starting to control costs with usage limits on frontier models, better defaults, and model routers. Even profitable Ramp is a high AI spender, but those controls can reduce bills without reducing usage.
• Brett sees a private-equity opportunity in bringing AI adoption at ordinary firms closer to the top 10% of adopters. Firms that deploy AI effectively could outperform less capable competitors in the same industry.
• Ara Kurazzian expects AI use to become table stakes for the median firm, while arguing that meaningful returns may not require top-tier spending. He says definitions of AI spend will shift as AI features become embedded in ordinary software.
• Asked for a five-year spending estimate, Ara Kurazzian said median-firm AI spend would probably remain below $1,000 per employee monthly, then questioned whether that figure should be annual instead and declined to offer a firm forecast.

Models (2)

• Ara Kurazzian says model competition can shift enterprise adoption quickly: Anthropic rose to leading business usage within about a year. He links enterprise demand partly to consumer visibility, coding tools, and product launches such as Grokbot.
• Brett argues that demanding business tasks still require substantial human guidance and stronger, more expensive models; he expects firms to spend on frontier models for exploration and competitive advantage. Ara Kurazzian counters that non-tech businesses can get useful returns without spending heavily.

VC (1)

• Ara Kurazzian says Ramp's highest-spending AI businesses are largely venture-backed technology companies. That concentration also creates correlated risk: if the AI trade or fundraising slows, those firms may cut spending together and affect the wider sector.

Coding (1)

• Ara Kurazzian calls coding agents AI's most commercially advanced use and says they improve productivity for software engineers, especially in tech. He doubts the median business can extract comparable value when it has few or no developers.

Safety (1)

• Brett argues that AI-enabled attacks will push cybersecurity spending across industries, since each company has its own technology stack to protect. He specifically raises open-weight models as a potential source of attack capability.

Models (2)

• Anthropic allocated 72% of first-half compute to training, research, and internal use, while 25% served paying customers. The guest says shifting training capacity to inference could quickly increase supply, while falling token prices require much faster user growth.
• The guest sees frontier labs moving toward internal drug discovery and other vertical businesses, where they could capture value from their strongest models directly. Partnerships or joint ventures may limit channel conflict with customers that rely on the same labs for tokens.

Enterprise (1)

• The guest argues that AI returns are becoming measurable beyond technology companies. Microsoft planned buyouts or cuts affecting roughly 60,000 employees, about a quarter of its global workforce, while executives tied the savings to funding AI investment.

Markets (1)

• Markets punished crowded AI-related positions as expectations met execution risk: Intel suffered its worst single-day move since 1974, and Morgan Stanley data showed the largest recorded monthly hedge-fund reduction in exposure during October.

AI Infrastructure (1)

• The four major hyperscalers turned free-cash-flow negative as AI spending rose, even as Q3 U.S. GDP growth reached 3.4% and manufacturing PMIs hit their highest level since May 2022. Publicly held U.S. debt also crossed 100% of GDP.

Big Tech (1)

• Google’s AI search mode may monetize less effectively than traditional search, while Reddit’s CEO cited search-related traffic concerns. Marty Bent sees Meta’s ad targeting and user engagement as a potential advantage over Google’s search advertising.

Elections (1)

• Brazil’s election result reversed a market rally driven by expectations of a Bolsonaro win: Lula prevailed, Bolsonaro left the country, and Brazil’s ETF and equities sold off. The guest says Lula’s win complicates U.S. efforts to counter China’s growing regional influence.

Diplomacy (1)

• The guest says U.S. access to Brazilian rare-earth minerals and broader efforts to strengthen ties across Latin America now face a political setback. Trump’s suggestion that Venezuela could become a prosperous 51st state showed the administration’s continuing interest in the region.

Custody (1)

• Binance reported a $6.3 billion theft after a North Korean spy allegedly socially engineered an engineer and accessed a laptop, enabling withdrawals across multiple chains. Binance paused withdrawals, set aside $6.34 billion to cover losses, and later reopened withdrawals.

BTC Markets (1)

• The Binance attackers reportedly swept 18,000 bitcoin and other assets, then used stablecoins in DeFi to borrow ETH and Solana before stablecoin freezes blocked that route. The guest notes Bitcoin fell below $77,000 but remained above a key long-term moving average, echoing past exchange shocks that preceded a market bottom.

Protocol (1)

• The guest argues Bitcoin’s limited protocol surface reduces security risk compared with chains built around more complex smart-contract systems. The Binance attack reportedly used Ethereum’s EIP-7702 delegation feature, which lets ordinary accounts act like smart contracts.

Coding (1)

• A Coinbase exercise pointed frontier AI models at Bitcoin Core for weeks and produced two minor bugs, both since patched. The guest says the result reinforces Bitcoin’s status as a heavily reviewed codebase with a comparatively small attack surface.

AI Infrastructure (1)

• Friedberg argues that AI companies and their customers can all earn strong returns: his illustrative stack estimates Nvidia turns each dollar of chip costs into four dollars of revenue, while Anthropic earns about 85% incremental gross margin.

Enterprise (2)

• Friedberg estimates Anthropic has reached only about 1% of its potential customer base for businesses able to spend $100,000 annually; Chamath sees revenue reaching hundreds of billions if larger customers prove ROI and expand spending.
• Chamath says he missed Q2 after pushing his sales team to focus only on huge deals; the hosts argue that smaller deals with customers who pay and start projects on time can build a large business.

Markets (1)

• Chamath sees AI infrastructure spending creating systemic financing risk: AI companies may compete with the U.S. Treasury for capital, pushing borrowing costs higher for either the AI sector or the wider economy.

Regulation (1)

• Friedberg predicts governments may regulate compute allocation as AI firms compete with governments for capital and influence; Sacks says Anthropic has built a large government-affairs operation and warns its IPO will expose its power as a major tech company.

Models (1)

• Sacks argues Anthropic's drive for recursive self-improvement helps explain its falling model costs, but creates tension with safety-focused critics; he says the company reported using RSI for a share of its model-development tasks in August.

Adoption (1)

• Jason says workplace AI use remains limited because companies restrict access to email and internal knowledge systems over cybersecurity concerns; he expects broader agent deployment once those risks fall, while Sacks says newer applications consume far more tokens.

Big Tech (3)

• Jason points to Microsoft growing revenue from $198 billion to $332 billion over four years while adding only 2,000 employees, arguing that AI can raise output per worker rather than simply eliminate jobs.
• Google's search revenue still grew, but cloud and other businesses grew faster; Sacks calls the stock oversold, while Friedberg says the key risk is whether consumer AI can replace search advertising as that business slows.
• Chamath says advertisers allege Google changed its ad auction model and may be extracting more revenue per click; he urges Google Investor Relations to address the claims before investors treat search earnings as pulled forward.

Elections (1)

• The hosts split on the midterm outlook: Chamath expects Republicans to keep the Senate and Democrats to narrowly win the House, while Jason predicts Democratic control of both chambers and Sacks expects a more typical midterm result.

Macro (1)

• Sacks rejects claims that the economy is a disaster and cites growth, income, and poverty figures; Jason counters that Trump's approval is at a career low and says inflation, war, and unmet promises have alienated some Republican voters.

Biology (1)

• Friedberg says farmers in Kenya were lining up to try true potato seed, a crop technology he encountered during his visit.

Markets (1)

• Aaron Griffith says investors will look for Anthropic’s next growth engine beyond coding, including drug development and legal technology. The IPO roadshow will give the company a chance to explain whether slower growth reflects competition or weaker demand across the AI market.

Safety (4)

• Anthropic’s S-1 lists catastrophic or existential harm from advanced AI among its risks, while using passive language that does not directly state the company itself holds that view. It also says model welfare could delay retiring older models, reflecting the company’s unusual concern about possible model sentience.
• Aaron Griffith traces Anthropic’s founding to safety-focused researchers who left OpenAI, after earlier founders had split from Google over concerns about AI’s effects on humanity. Anthropic initially attracted money from Sam Bankman-Fried and other investors tied to effective altruism before enterprise software sales drew broader venture capital.
• Mike Isaac says the PHP vulnerability exposed how widely internet infrastructure depends on old code that can contain serious flaws. AI tools can find vulnerabilities faster, but Isaac doubts defenders will keep pace; Max Reed cites Joshua Sachs’s argument that defenders still have time to strengthen systems before criminals adapt.
• Jasmine Sun says a startup called Cathedral, staffed by former DOGE workers, accessed Anthropic’s Slack and IT systems and obtained trade secrets. The breach showed that even AI companies with advanced cyber models can leave their own internal systems exposed.

Startups (1)

• Anthropic’s founders retain unusually strong control through five stock classes, a majority voting stake, and an independent trust that controls most board seats. Jasmine Sun says the founders pledged most of their equity to charity, while Anthropic’s culture-fit interview asks employees whether they would work there if their equity became worthless.

Elections (2)

• Jasmine Sun says data centers drew bipartisan public opposition but rarely ranked among voters’ top concerns, limiting their influence on most major races. She reported stronger local effects, including recall efforts and city-council changes, and said rural voters could matter in a few close contests.
• Jasmine Sun says Republican voters broadly favor slower AI deployment with safeguards, while party leaders have largely followed Donald Trump’s deregulatory line. She sees a possible post-midterm split between free-market Republicans and new-right groups advocating rules on children, jobs, and safety.

Big Tech (1)

• Mike Isaac expects technology companies to elevate staff who can build ties with Democrats if Democrats gain power, after years of firms cultivating Republican relationships. Jasmine Sun says the cultural shift among venture capitalists appears limited, especially around issues such as DEI.

Regulation (1)

• Aaron Griffith says California Proposition 40 would impose a one-time 5% tax on billionaires’ wealth, including unrealized gains and private startup shares. Opponents raised $333 million to defeat it, arguing the measure is poorly designed and could discourage founders, while some health groups question its long-term funding plan.

Labor (1)

• Aaron Griffith says Microsoft offered buyouts to 60,000 employees, but expected only 3% to 5% to accept, or roughly 3,000 people at most. She connects the cuts to years of tech-sector downsizing and Microsoft’s AI and infrastructure spending, while criticizing the company’s claim that buyouts give workers more control.

Coding (1)

• Mike Isaac says an Amazon engineering memo rejected token use and lines of code as measures of software productivity, calling instead for evaluation based on long-term outcomes. Isaac notes that long-term results are difficult to measure in quarterly employment reviews, leaving the company without an easy replacement metric.

Models (1)

• Jasmine Sun describes an Anthropic randomized trial in which professional statistical analysts often followed AI recommendations and reused AI arguments to justify their choices, while rarely admitting influence. Sun warns that people may quietly outsource decisions to AI without recognizing how much the systems shape their judgment.

VC (1)

• Aaron Griffith says Andreessen Horowitz renamed its crypto fund A16Z Frontier, a sign that venture firms are broadening their mandates as AI absorbs most startup funding. She says crypto funds face fewer investable companies because builders have shifted toward AI, while the firm denies abandoning crypto.

BTC Markets (5)

• The host argues Bitcoin benefits when central banks devalue fiat currencies, while the current market remains range-bound around $79,000 to $81,500.
• The host reported Bitcoin at $81,370, a $1.64 trillion market cap, and 1,293 transactions in Clark’s mempool; mempool.space showed 57,846 unconfirmed transactions.
• Jason Calacanis predicts Bitcoin will never set another all-time high and says investors should favor AI; the host counters that Bitcoin is money and can coexist with AI investments.
• The hosts cite sharp declines in Brazilian assets after Lula’s victory and argue that Bitcoin self-custody can protect savings from currency and political risk; they also warn Brazil’s PIX and planned Drex enable more state oversight.
• The host says Bitcoin-backed loan rates are falling as lending capital grows, and argues that rates below home-equity credit would make Bitcoin more attractive collateral because lenders can liquidate it continuously.

Inflation (1)

• The host says Trump’s stated willingness to tolerate high inflation strengthens Bitcoin’s monetary case, while AI-driven productivity does not remove the need to store wealth in hard money.

AI Infrastructure (1)

• Paul Kedrosky’s bear case is that projected AI infrastructure spending needs enormous revenue to earn an adequate return; he also argues frontier labs must assess how many customers need frontier-level models.

Safety (3)

• The hosts flag Anthropic’s concentrated control as a governance concern: its team retains majority ownership, while a five-person trust appoints the board despite the company’s stated risk of catastrophic harm.
• The host says scammers recruit teenagers through Roblox and Discord to call victims and steal Bitcoin, sometimes with Russian involvement; the host urges people not to answer unknown callers.
• Coinbase tested five leading models with 16 agents against Bitcoin Core code and found two minor issues; the hosts say AI-assisted review supports faster patching, while warning developers not to surrender independent judgment.

Elections (2)

• Brazil’s election drew allegations of irregularities: the host says voting hours were extended in Lula-favorable districts and Flavio Bolsonaro faced pressure to remain in Brazil, while acknowledging the reports were unconfirmed.
• The host treats Senator Alex Padilla’s call to investigate Elon Musk without citing a specific crime as a warning sign of political targeting, and says socialist proposals in New York will face budget and implementation limits.

Models (1)

• Lula promised sovereign Brazilian AI powered by domestic renewable energy; the host questions whether Brazil can create the economic conditions to deliver it and warns that state-controlled AI could shape permitted information.

Israel (1)

• Israel’s election produced no clear governing majority, leaving coalition negotiations ahead; the host notes a record showing for Arab parties and says both likely governing blocs oppose a two-state solution and take a hard line on Iran.

Protocol (2)

• Bitcoin Core disclosed two denial-of-service vulnerabilities involving unbounded memory growth; both were patched, and the hosts urged node operators to update while describing the flaws as medium severity.
• Layer 2 Labs delayed its eCash fork-related release after Bitcoin Core’s vulnerability fixes and told node and pool operators to update before the fork point; the hosts support testing drivechains but dispute their proposed economics and trust assumptions.

Privacy (1)

• The hosts discussed PISA, a regtest prototype combining PayJoin with cross-input signature aggregation to make transaction ownership harder to infer; PayJoin, Lightning, and ecash already offer privacy tools, while PISA would require a soft fork for mainnet.

Coding (1)

• A GitHub deletion removed private forks of a startup’s repository after Anthropic acquired the original owner; the startup recovered its code from an employee’s laptop, exposing the risk of relying on a hosted repository alone.

Custody (1)

• Google previewed an MPC custody service for financial institutions, with key shares held in separate hardware enclaves; the hosts see it as Fireblocks competition but stress that Google’s coordination layer differs from native Bitcoin multisig and FROST.

Markets (1)

• The hosts connect institutional custody and tokenization efforts to always-on markets: ICE invested in Trade.xyz, a Hyperliquid-based derivatives venue, while Stan Druckenmiller’s first tweet promoted Hyperliquid.

Regulation (1)

• The host says Fairshake remains active in election spending and Senator Bill Hagerty continues to push market-structure legislation; the host also notes a Thai court ruling that Bitcoin can be owned, transferred, and stolen as property.

Social Media (1)

• The hosts warn that algorithm-driven posts about grid shutdowns and election emergencies can amplify panic; one host recalls New York blackouts becoming dangerous after the first day, while acknowledging the city has handled outages before.

Media (1)

• The hosts briefly discussed Kanye West’s apology op-ed and uncertainty about which venues will book his tour; they also recalled seeing Daft Punk and speculated that the group could reunite for a lucrative tour.

AI Infrastructure (1)

• Andy Burman identified compute supply as a core constraint for model labs, with Anthropic and OpenAI competing to secure capacity from a limited set of providers. He said Anthropic’s profitability makes its business look stronger, while its IPO pricing will test investor appetite amid pressure on neoclouds.

Enterprise (2)

• Andy Burman expects token prices and the cost of intelligence to keep falling, while arguing that agent deployments can sharply increase usage. He said many large companies still lack connections between models and business data, leaving employees with basic email and document use rather than workflow-level automation.
• Andy Burman called people who pass AI output along without adding judgment “meat proxies” and said workers should be able to defend their reasoning and deliverables. The host described timed, recorded research exercises and paired work as ways to test whether employees understand and can improve AI-generated results.

Agents (3)

• Andy Burman said tool access and relevant company data determine whether agents produce useful work; models alone cannot deliver expected returns. He expects fleets of agents to handle business goals over time, but estimated self-driving companies could take two to ten years to emerge.
• The host described using an agent connected to Slack, Notion, and calendars to identify unfinished assignments and surface missed work. Andy Burman said connecting tools and resources increases token use, but the return comes when agents can act on company data rather than merely generate polished messages.
• The host argued that agent platforms could make AI mainstream among nontechnical users after building an Austin home-search database from brokers’ social media and video listings. Andy Burman said browser use had become capable of handling tasks across desktop and SaaS applications, though platform restrictions can block actions.

Markets (1)

• John Nay said model labs may expand beyond token billing through outcome-based pricing or businesses built on top of their models. He cited charging for completed customer conversations as one possible structure, while noting that outcome pricing remains early even in application software.

Education (2)

• Alpha School promises computer-based academics in the morning and afternoons for life skills, but a New York Times review found many students missed its doubled-growth target. John Nay said the model may suit self-directed students, while the host warned that high tuition and selective enrollment make early results hard to generalize.
• The host argued that AI-generated schoolwork can weaken writing, reading comprehension, and independent thought when students copy outputs without engaging with them. John Nay said education should emphasize philosophical reasoning and durable human skills as digital intelligence becomes cheap.

Labor (2)

• The host linked AI productivity to Microsoft’s offer of buyouts to 60,000 employees and argued that companies may hold headcount steady as AI tools improve. The host urged children to learn entrepreneurship and predicted fewer conventional jobs; Andy Burman questioned whether college remains worth its cost.
• John Nay said AI could move lawyers from routine document work toward advising clients on strategy and deal scenarios. Andy Burman expects fewer junior hires and a higher bar for entry-level roles, with verbal communication increasingly valuable; the host argued that human judgment and taste still shape AI’s drafts.

Open Source (1)

• Reddit’s r/opensource moderators barred projects that use, are made by, or are intended for AI, and restricted posts to projects at least a year old with multiple contributors. John Nay linked the backlash to anxiety over changing software work; Andy Burman said open source has increasingly served as a product-shipping channel for AWS.

Philosophy (1)

• The panel connected AI’s progress in mathematics and writing to questions of purpose: a student asked what learning math means if AI can do it better, and the host used Ecclesiastes to frame creative work as meaningful within a limited life. John Nay argued that human values and creativity will guide where abundant intelligence gets applied.