Smash Notes

Back to Josh Brown: If This Is A Bubble, It’s Pathetic, with Josh Brown.

What Is the Bear Case Against Anthropic?

Scott Galloway says the bear case against Anthropic is that large companies will put a budget on AI use, and that frontier models have no real switching costs.

About 18 months ago, he says, Fortune 500 leaders told employees to go do some AI and bought it like older software, a fee per person per month. Token use then got out of hand, including jobs left running for 48 hours over a weekend. Someone from Uber said in March that the company had already blown through its 2026 token budget in the first quarter. The response he expects is not a ban. Departments get a set amount, because the company is running a business rather than an experiment. He calls that rationalizing token use, not rationing it.

Open-weight and free models are the second half. A Fortune 500 team that is a few cents a share behind its target can trace the gap to the Anthropic bill and use a cheaper model for most of the work, saving the expensive frontier model for a small slice. A harness can make that choice step by step. He says that is bearish for anyone selling the premium model at a premium price, and he calls it the opening of companies getting more careful with the spend.

Transcript

Josh Brown: If This Is A Bubble, It’s Pathetic ·

Prof G Markets

More from this episode

  1. How Fast Is Anthropic's Revenue Growing?Josh Brown says the revenue growth is what stood out in Anthropic's filing, even though leaks and comments from private investors had already pointed the same…
  2. Why Is Anthropic's $80.7 Billion Loss the Wrong Number?Josh Brown says Anthropic's $80.7 billion headline loss is the wrong figure to fixate on.
  3. Does Anthropic Have a Moat?Josh Brown does not think Anthropic has a moat like SpaceX, Nvidia, or Apple.
  4. How Much Has Anthropic Agreed to Spend on Compute?Ed Elson says Anthropic has already signed up to spend $800 billion, and those dollars are not on the income statement yet.
  5. What Did Josh Brown Make of the Anthropic S-1?Josh Brown wanted to hate the Anthropic S-1, but after reading it he recognized the numbers and stopped short of a full reversal.
  6. Why Does Josh Brown Think Anthropic Timed Its IPO Well?Josh Brown says Anthropic nailed the timing of its IPO.
  7. Why Does Josh Brown Say the AI Bubble Is Pathetic?Josh Brown says that if this is a bubble, it is the most pathetic one he has ever seen, and an anti-bubble.
  8. Who Benefits If the AI Neoclouds Fail?Josh Brown says a shakeout among neoclouds is good for the companies that already own compute.
  9. Will Anthropic Create Thousands of Multimillionaires?Josh Brown says Anthropic is going to create thousands of multimillionaire households.
  10. What Does Josh Brown Think Is Netflix's Biggest Problem?Josh Brown says Netflix's biggest problem is a comparison the company cannot do much about.
  11. When Does a Bull Market Hit Its Yearly High?Josh Brown says the high of the year in a bull market lands in December or January almost all the time.

People

More answers like this

More with Scott Galloway

More with Ed Elson

Related episodes

Plays from this note through the rest of the episode.

Note

Weekly highlights

One letter a week.

The notes worth hearing, with the minute they were said.