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Back to Inside Anthropic’s trillion-dollar AI gamble, with Joey Brookhart.

Does the AI Industry Follow Apple's iPhone Playbook?

Nilay Patel says the AI industry does not follow Apple's iPhone playbook. Apple keeps the iPhone looking the same for several years, builds the tooling for a new iPhone, and reuses it for two, three, or four models. After a new iPhone ships, Apple keeps selling the previous one so that development program keeps earning.

The AI industry puts the weight on the next new thing, drops the old one quickly, and moves customers onto a newer expensive product while the one after that is already being built. The pattern should eventually leave a product worth collecting margin on while the labs spend on what comes next. Where Anthropic sits in that cycle is still open.

Grokipedia·Apple·Nilay Patel

Transcript

Inside Anthropic’s trillion-dollar AI gamble ·

Decoder with Nilay Patel

More from this episode

  1. What Is Anthropic's Annual Recurring Revenue?Joey Brookhart says Anthropic's S-1 shows a company that scaled, with capital efficiency, to a valuation above a trillion dollars and more than $70 billion in…
  2. How Did Anthropic's Inference Margins Turn Positive?Joey Brookhart says Anthropic's gross margin on inference went from negative 94% two years ago to positive 85% now.
  3. Why Does 80% of Anthropic's Revenue Come From New Models?Joey Brookhart says 80% of Anthropic's revenue in the last three months came from models released in the last six months.
  4. Why Does Anthropic's S-1 Show an $80 Billion Loss?Joey Brookhart says Anthropic's $80 billion loss is a non-cash charge for warrants and convertible notes after the valuation jumped, not cash missing from the…
  5. Can Anthropic Pay for Its Compute Commitments?Joey Brookhart says Anthropic can cover its compute commitments with revenue. Nilay Patel cites an analysis above $800 billion over 10 years.
  6. How Do OpenAI's Margins Compare With Anthropic's?Joey Brookhart says OpenAI's margins do not look like Anthropic's.
  7. Why Did Anthropic's Third Quarter Slow Down?Joey Brookhart says Anthropic's third quarter slowed because Meta, probably more than 10% of revenue, cut Claude Code seats from 60,000 to 30,000, and because…

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