Casey Newton

Kevin Roose says Anthropic reported an $80.7 billion net loss for the six months ending June 30, and that most of the loss comes from convertible notes. On cash, the business generated about $4 billion of operating cash flow in the first half of the year.

Casey Newton says that cash flow is the reply to people who argue frontier AI labs only burn money and will never make a profit. Before these figures were public, it was easy to assume inference could never be profitable and that open models would pull customers away. The filing shows companies spending heavily with Anthropic, at margins he says are strong enough that some readers will ask why the company is keeping so much of the money.

Casey Newton says Anthropic's filing reports 900 percent net revenue retention. A typical customer who spent $100 with Anthropic one year was spending $900 a year later. He says that jump is the clearest picture in the filing of how fast Anthropic is scaling. He sets that next to a company that had essentially no revenue four years ago and then multiplied revenue by about 10 each year for three years, growth he says does not show up in ordinary capitalism.

Kevin Roose says retention around 150 percent used to count as elite. Anthropic's 900 percent is far beyond that, and he reads it as evidence that the models have become very hard for large customers to drop.

Casey Newton expects Anthropic going public to create hundreds, maybe a couple thousand new millionaires, multimillionaires, and decamillionaires in San Francisco. Many of the people Anthropic hires are motivated to give away a lot of the money, so a lot of philanthropy is coming for local, national, and international causes. His hope is that the new Anthropic millionaires become great citizens and give some of the wealth back to the city where it was created.

He is also worried about a significant spike in inequality in San Francisco, where inequality is already palpable. The city does not make enough houses for the people who want them, and moving there to pursue a dream could get even ha

Kevin Roose says Anthropic has officially filed to go public, and he calls the listing potentially one of the largest IPOs in history. Casey Newton says Anthropic is the first of the frontier labs to file. The company sent a confidential prospectus to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, and the public version now runs about 400 pages.

An S-1 is the prospectus a company files before it sells shares on a stock exchange. It has to show the balance sheet, the cash flows, and who owns how much of the company. Kevin Roose describes that as Anthropic standing on a public stage, warts and all, and asking the world to judge it.

Casey Newton says his fiancé works at Anthropic, so the off

Kevin Roose says AI realism, Casey Newton's phrase, is the stance of people who are resigned to AI or excited that it is not going away. They are curious, interested, and maybe a little scared, and the reaction to the fear is to understand the technology instead of looking away. That is the audience Machine Gods is looking for.

The show is not saying AI is amazing and that an AI utopia is coming. It is also not saying the technology is fake, will disappear on its own, and so needs no regulation and no worry. For a while, Roose says, there was a lot of demand for that kind of cope: this is not happening, you do not have to pay attention, it sucks, it is hurting the environment. He still sees

Kevin Roose says Machine Gods, the show he and Casey Newton started after Hard Fork, is meant to be video first. They are going to care how it looks, and give people reasons to watch as well as listen. Some listeners do not want a video podcast, so the audio still has to be worth hearing on its own. His view is that you cannot make a podcast now without video on top of it, and they want a version as good as two middle-aged journalists can manage on YouTube.

Nilay Patel notes that the show is a partnership with NPR. The other reason Roose gives for the leap is the AI story itself: a platform shift, with new companies, new characters, and new ideas to talk about. Media formats usually change

Kevin Roose left The New York Times, and left Hard Fork with Casey Newton, to build on YouTube. Nilay Patel had been telling him not to for as long as Roose had been trying to talk himself into it. Media companies, Roose says, have been wary of going all in on YouTube or any other video platform, and the ones that did often came out unhappy. A pivot to video can waste money on work that does not pay for itself, and few institutions are built for that kind of long-term bet.

He has spent years trying to push people in media toward YouTube. He calls it the most important media platform in the world, and a place where high-quality journalism is a vanishingly small slice of the whole. Part of le

Kevin Roose says Google DeepMind reported that four Gemini 4 Argon agents beat Minecraft without any human help in 27 hours and 14 minutes, costing $1,620 at Argon's planned 2027 price. The agents split up tasks, warned each other about threats, recovered items from dead teammates, and logged mistakes in a shared memory. They died 605 times and still finished the game.

Casey Newton says a seven-year-old can also beat Minecraft, and that a model is not AGI to him if it cannot beat Elden Ring. Kevin Roose says tech companies use video games as a training ground, and that Anthropic tested Claude on Pokemon. He says the path to the singularity leads through Minecraft and Pokemon.

Jared Krieger, the CEO of KG Growth Partners, said a bid for a downtown San Francisco mall is not a data center in the traditional sense. He called it a new category, a regenerative urban energy center. Casey Newton reads that line and says Americans do not want data centers nearby.

Kevin Roose says the SF Standard, in a story by Jessica Blough, reported that a technology company is interested in the San Francisco Centre mall, including the former Bloomingdale's, as a data center site. KG Growth Partners told the Standard it worked with that company on a bid for the entire mall. Kevin Roose says one way past the backlash is to put GPUs in dead malls and keep Dave and Buster's and Claire's.

Casey Newton says OpenAI fired Mikita Balesni, Tomek Korbak, and their colleague Jasmine Wang in early October, saying they had violated policies for handling sensitive information. The researchers dispute that. They say they did nothing wrong, and that the outside work was part of their jobs.

Kevin Roose says OpenAI posted on X that its investigation of Mikita, Tomek, and Jasmine found sensitive information policy violations and a breach beyond what they had described. The post denied that OpenAI fired them for raising safety concerns, and said the company remains committed to outside assessors and monitoring. Kevin Roose says he and Casey Newton had reached out to OpenAI and had not heard

Casey Newton says Elon Musk pledged on Monday to give one share of his company SpaceX to every kid in America next year. The offer arrived a day after Anthropic announced that it will commit 5% of its shares to a new public benefit fund. In a response to that post, Elon Musk wrote that he recommends giving the shares directly to the public. Casey Newton says the story comes from PBS.

Casey Newton calls the pledge a heartwarming story as the holidays approached, and he introduces Elon Musk as a famous philanthropist and also the person who dismantled USAID. He asks why anyone would set up an organization to disperse the money when the shares could go directly to children. Kevin Roose loves t

Tomek Korbak says he and Mikita Balesni both had disappearing messages turned on. He says that choice was maybe disappointing for an OpenAI security team that wanted to take photos of their conversations, and that for the two of them disappearing messages were a security best practice.

Casey Newton says some people view disappearing messages as suspicious and others see them as the most secure way to communicate. Tomek Korbak says that when you cannot see evidence of a leak, you would presume innocence, but that at OpenAI, when you are not able to prove your innocence, you are presumed guilty.

Kevin Roose says he and Casey Newton took a $480,000 grant from the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism so their new show, Machine Gods, could scale quickly and hire a team. The show is video-first, which costs more than an audio show. Casey Newton has worked with Tarbell for his newsletter for several years and has had a Tarbell fellow. The center never told him what to cover or how to cover it, has no editorial control, and will not know what the show covers. If it had tried to steer the coverage, they would not have taken the money.

Roose says the center wants to fund independent, rigorous AI journalism. He rejects the idea of a shadowy group steering people to fear AI. People are getting f

Casey Newton reported that the moderators make about $28,000 a year. The moderators often leave the job with post-traumatic stress caused by the rough working conditions of the job.