Kevin Roose

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.

Kevin Roose says a Halloween skeleton in his neighborhood was not the handiwork of a middle-aged dad. The talking skeleton is named Uncle Murray and is the creation of a very impressive and precocious nine-year-old girl named Natalie Chabas.

On a recent episode of Machine Gods, Kevin Roose had remarked on the decoration and read the details as the work of an AI-obsessed dad. He had not taken proper time to check, even though Machine Gods strives for accuracy. Natalie Chabas is nine. Back in August, she saw a plastic skeleton at Home Depot that could say three recorded sentences. A clip of the October visit opens by asking what brought the visitor over on a fine evening.

Uncle Murray is Nat

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 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

Kevin Roose says that during the five days after Sam Altman was fired, OpenAI's board looked for a new chief executive and passed on two options. Alexander Wang, whom Roose describes as Altman's former roommate, told the board he was interested in the job, according to Roose's sources. Alex Kantrowitz notes that Wang now runs Meta's Superintelligence Lab.

The board also held a middle-of-the-night call with Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, the chief executive and president of Anthropic. They had left OpenAI about three years earlier, in Roose's account, because they could not trust Altman. Each side was sounding the other out. One idea on the table was merging OpenAI and Anthropic under Dari

Kevin Roose says Sergey Brin returned to Google after retiring in 2019 because an OpenAI researcher shamed him at a party for sitting out AI. Brin had planned to spend his days on a yacht reading science papers. Roose is not sure how many years that lasted, only that it was at least a few, and Brin was still in semi-retirement. At the party the researcher asked why one of the seven or eight richest people in the world was on the sidelines while AI, the dream of computer science, was happening.

Brin got competitive. In Roose's account, he asked why Google was behind, called the lead Google's birthright, and treated Google as the first AGI company because it invented the transformer. He came

Kevin Roose's probability of doom has gone down in the last few weeks because everyone is freaking out about AI risk, a shift he links, with some hesitation, to feeling paradoxically less worried.

Before Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic, and before Hugging Face, almost no one thought about AI risk or existential threats. The only people thinking about it were weirdos in the Bay Area. Now people on the street ask about it, and people at dinner tables talk about it. High school classmates he has not spoken with in 15 years text to ask whether everyone is going to die.

He frames the new attention as a possible movie moment, humanity banding together to save itself from an asteroid, and he

Kevin Roose says that if AI starts improving itself, new models do not have to wait on human researchers, and he thinks the labs should stop before that loop closes. He believes recursive self-improvement is possible, the labs are racing to do it, and it is dangerous.

Alex Kantrowitz cites an Anthropic figure that Claude is now the lead on 26 percent of Anthropic's AI research and development projects, not a team member, a pair programmer, or a coding assistant. OpenAI has put out versions of the same kind of disclosure. Roose sees no reason the share would not rise to 50 percent, 75 percent, or someday 100 percent. OpenAI's goal is to build an automated AI researcher. If the labs close the

Kevin Roose says Google fell behind in the AI race because its leaders did not believe in artificial general intelligence the way Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Demis Hassabis do. Google had the resources, the talent, and the breakthroughs, and still lacked that belief. Halfway through his book, a story he expected to be about technology turned out to be about belief. For all the flaws, stumbles, and departures, OpenAI and Anthropic are the two most believing organizations, and that belief is why OpenAI is still in the lead or close to it.

Belief that the work could become artificial general intelligence is an essential ingredient. OpenAI still has very talented people. Roose has talked with

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

Kevin Roose says OpenAI researchers found they can make models smarter without retraining them. They can pour more compute into chains of thought so the models reason through problems. In three years, the models went from failing the strawberry counting test to solving the Millennium Prize problems.

The shift hit while a model worked through a math problem. Researchers felt the world was going to end and piled onto a group text with other researchers, calling the model an alien mind. Even people at OpenAI thought they were crazy. A middle-of-the-night text got a reply that the lab would get to it later. The finding was a way to raise ability on the spot: pour more compute into chains of tho

Kevin Roose says Dario Amodei and his six co-founders left OpenAI because Sam Altman kept telling them one thing and someone else something different, or making a promise he did not follow through on. There was no single inciting incident. The pattern runs back to the founding days of OpenAI.

Altman is very good at reading the room and understanding what people want him to do in a given moment. That skill is a huge asset when he raises money from Masa Son and other investors. It let OpenAI scale quickly and get back in the good graces of the Trump administration by saying things that administration wanted to hear. The same habit is a superpower, a liability, or something in between, dependi

Kevin Roose stopped doubting the transformative potential of AI products because he uses them, and that daily use never happened with crypto. He used to worry he was being duped. He was never a crypto booster. He thought crypto was interesting and that people should take it seriously.

He still wants broader awareness, because crypto people run the country now and are doing scams and frauds that only insiders understand. He sold an NFT as a stunt to learn by doing the thing, not as a claim that NFTs would be the future of ownership. With AI he likes the tools and uses them all the time, not to write, while starting a company. Crypto was a way to speculate, not a vital part of daily life. Usi

Kevin Roose says AI is probably the most important thing ever created, though fire is up there too. He went in pretty skeptical that AI would be categorically different from other tools and thought of AI as normal technology. He changed his mind.

Talking with the people building it shifted him. He sees no real technical reason they cannot build something smarter than humans, and a system like that would be incredibly transformative. Humans have never been the second smartest species on the planet, and no one knows how that would go. Steam engines did not go rogue, hack competitors, or develop bioweapons the engineers never expected. As a journalist trying to get the story down, he gets frus

Kevin Roose calls the AI race a Red Queen race, a term from evolutionary biology for a survival-of-the-fittest contest among rivals. No matter how fast a lab goes, someone else is always going faster, so the labs race just to stay in the same place. He left less reassured than at his starting point that the technology can be developed safely.

He went in thinking there were grownups in the room and they seemed trustworthy. He liked that AI leaders seemed to take safety and the harms of their products very seriously, at least next to social media, which he grew up covering. Mark Zuckerberg was not going around during the early days of Facebook saying the product could kill millions of people.