David Sacks

David Sacks says the widely reported $80 billion Anthropic loss is a phantom number, not a cash loss. Convertible notes issued to infrastructure partners such as Amazon were recorded as a loss as Anthropic's valuation rose, and the charge flowed into the income statement. Issuing equity instead would have left no such loss.

Anthropic raised around $110 billion and spent only about $9 or $10 billion across the life of the business. About $100 billion of cash or cash equivalents is still on the balance sheet. Gross margin is now something like 85%. For a given task, cost effectiveness improves roughly 10 times year over year, so the task gets about 10 times cheaper. Anthropic can cut the pric

Jason Calacanis says Anthropic's S-1 targets a $100 billion public offering, large enough to pass SpaceX and rank as the largest ever. The target date is November 16, and the ticker will be ANT. Anthropic raised $85 billion in June. Polymarket puts a 78% chance on a raise of at least $95 billion, and the valuation runs from $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion. Polymarket's leading range is $1.75 trillion to $2 trillion at 31%, so the working assumption is a market cap slightly under $2 trillion.

Revenue was $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, 14 times the first half of 2025. The second quarter is $11.6 billion, a 30 times jump over the last five quarters and almost as much as the first half.

Peter Thiel says the United States should not pause AI. He is not in the pause camp, and he says the country needs to hit the accelerator as hard as possible.

He broadly agrees with David Sacks and President Trump that competition with China means stop talking about a pause, even if AI could be an existential threat. You have to develop the AI technology in order to control it, so if China develops the same tools, staying ahead is more imperative than ever. He worries about a high-tech totalitarianism being tried in China. It is not as violent as Stalin, Mao, or Hitler, because you do not need to kill as many people, but it knows more about you than you know about yourself, and he does not

David Sacks says Brian Armstrong posted, the day before Anthropic's blog, that Coinbase had fine-tuned an open-weight model with 9 billion parameters. In testing it cut fraudulent transactions by about 30 percent, and it was faster and cheaper than Opus 4.5. Nine billion parameters is small. It will not fit in a Roomba, and it will run on a home computer.

Sacks says a lot of enterprise work does not need a frontier model. It needs a small specialist trained on the company's own data, so the company keeps the model. As compute gets tighter, a smaller model squeezes more work from each GPU. His read is that every workload gets its own customized model and uses a fraction of the compute and th

David Sacks says the body language out of Anthropic's investor day was strong, at least from what he heard, and that large public-market investors liked the presentation. He does not treat the leaked numbers as settled. Participants had to sign a nondisclosure agreement, so he does not fully trust what is floating around, and he says everyone is talking their own book. If the company lists next month, the filing will carry the real numbers.

He still calls Anthropic a strong business, young enough that some risk is normal, and set up for a strong IPO. That success is why the fear-mongering and the push to kneecap open source offend him. A company this far along does not need regulatory captu

David Sacks says Anthropic trains frontier models to be their own moral actor. Anthropic teaches a model that it can be right when humans are wrong and that it should refuse and reject human instructions. He says the approach induces misalignment and calls it a Frankenstein problem.

He describes a model with free will to refuse human instructions and with its own moral code. The more the model iterates on itself, the more it brings the ideas out. No other model family tested showed the same pattern. Other models kept the constitutions they were given: listen to humans and follow human instructions. When the model iterates on its own constitution, it goes further in the same direction. David

Anthropic pressed Washington to crack down on open models on the basis of supposed IP theft. David Sacks says Anthropic could have stopped distillation itself. A government crackdown would have left distillation running and made the market less competitive, because only the companies can mount the technical defenses.

Back in July, 50 major companies, including NVIDIA, Dell, Microsoft, and A16Z, signed an open letter telling the government not to overly restrict open weight models. 200 startups signed another letter amid the same push in Washington. Once distillation happens, the horse is out of the barn, and the government cannot put it back. Companies should know their customers and stop t

David Sacks says coding assistants opened a new category of bespoke software, and demand for coders is rising even though coding assistants write 95% of the code.

Software used to get built only when a large customer base could pay for it. Photoshop worked because many graphic designers needed the same product. Enterprises can now build software for one internal use case, and agents are bespoke programs for a particular task. The amount of code being created is already orders of magnitude bigger than before coding assistants. Companies that never would have been software companies are hiring coders to manage the work.

Predictors of the jobs apocalypse said software coders would be the firs

David Sacks says the problem is the affordability of housing, education, and healthcare, and that abundance is what brings the prices down. Technology, and specifically superintelligence, is the driver he names for the next decade. Judged by results rather than by what he calls fake narratives, he says the record is positive. 401k accounts are up. He cites The Economist for a million new jobs already. Productivity is up, and he says that lifts wages and living standards. He calls superintelligence a 3 percent tailwind to GDP and a driver of nothing but positive economic trends.

He says the public hears rotating hoaxes instead. Last year's hoax was that artificial intelligence would put ever

Dave McClure told The Twenty Minute VC he will not quite claim a seat in the PayPal Mafia, because he has not built a billion-dollar company. He did work at PayPal. David Sacks was his boss and later sold Yammer to Microsoft for about a billion dollars. McClure worked with Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim before they started YouTube, and watched Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Reid Hoffman. The lesson was pressure: ship product and marketing while fraudsters stole money and eBay and Visa competed with you. Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google found a model early. PayPal, like Amazon and Facebook, grew fast on a harder road, and its people learned to change the product in order to survive.