Anthropic’s IPO Leak, OpenAI’s Dots vs. Meta’s Muse, Visual Turing Test

Big Technology Podcast

The hosts analyze the leaked Anthropic S-1 document, focusing on its explosive revenue growth alongside massive, binding compute commitments that raise

Key takeaways

• Anthropic's leaked S-1 shows $4.6B in revenue but commits to spending $518B on compute over the next decade, with 80% of that spend being non-cancelable.
• The S&P 500 is experiencing its worst breadth since the dot-com bubble, with AI investments accounting for half of the index's EPS growth this year.

Main topics

• Anthropic IPO S-1 leak and financial projections
• S&P 500 market breadth and AI dependency

Notable quotes

"As Anthropic goes, so goes the AI trade."

Conclusion

The episode concludes that while frontier AI agents like Dots demonstrate remarkable utility for

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) Anthropix IPO numbers leak. Are they good enough to save the economy? OpenAI has a new always-on agent called DOTS. And have we passed the visual Turing test? That's coming up on a Big Technology Podcast Friday edition right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. We have a great show for you today. The long-awaited anthropic pre-IPO numbers are out, courtesy of a leaked report in Reuters. We're going to go over the numbers and talk about whether they're good enough to keep this economy running. We also have a new always-on agent from OpenAI called DOTS. I've tried it. I'm going to give my reflections. why I'm sending it a ton of work already. And then finally, we're going to talk about Tavis and the visual Turing test. Yes, there are some bots now that can completely fool you into thinking they're human on a video call. Joining us as always on Fridays to do it is Ranjan Roy of Margins. Ranjan, great to see you. Speaker 2 (1:31) Good to see you. We're getting so much closer to the real S1 and we're getting these tidbits and we're going to dig into it. But I mean, did you see they're going to... I think they announced Investor Day is supposed to be October 14th. And that means we're on track for a pre-Thanksgiving anthropic IPO. Speaker 4 (1:51) Exactly. Yeah, it's coming in November. I think there's no doubt it comes this November. And as you mentioned, we got a leak. So Reuters did scoop. basically the entire S1. They didn't print it out for us, but they gave us all the numbers that Anthropic is taking to Wall Street. And we finally have some like binding numbers, not ARR. And I'm actually curious how you read them, because there are some good numbers in there. And there are some numbers in there that make you just kind of shake your head and ask, how is this going to work? So if you will, let me give you a couple of them to start off with. So the good news is the company's revenue is, if you're anthropic, the good news is the company's revenue is growing exponentially, right? 400 million in 2024, 4.6 billion total in 2025. Now, at the end of the year, they said they had a 10 billion ARR. But like if you have a 1 billion ARR in January and 10 in December, 4.6 is kind of where you would imagine things net out. The crazy number to me. is on that 4.6 billion in revenue that they reported, they said, they told investors, they plan to spend 518 billion over the next decade on computing and infrastructure. And of that, 80 % of that spend, 80 % of the spend is binding. So you're looking at a company that just basically made, in the most recent year that it can report, $4 billion that has committed. $400 billion and has no way of getting out of it. These are the numbers. Your reaction. Speaker 2 (3:28) My reaction is I was a little disappointed, not in the numbers, which we will get into, is that the leak doesn't have the H1 2026, the first half of the year financials. When they're definitely going to need to be. filing and actually publicly stating some amount of 2026 financials and revenue numbers and loss numbers, which I'm sure they will likely be. But so we have a good look at what Anthropic looked like at the end of 2025. And again, $4.6 billion in revenue. I think what was the net loss was around, for reference, there's this $42 billion number that's being thrown around as a net loss. And I say this as someone who probably is going to be skeptical or dig into a lot of their numbers, but it's not actually $42 billion, $34 billion of it is. It's a weird accounting treatment issue related to the company actually growing in value a lot. But the net loss is still around $8 billion. They're still losing around $2 to actually make every single dollar that they're making. So to me, in 2025, they were losing a lot of money. What does it look like in 2026? There's all these little leaks that they're supposedly profitable back in May and June. I don't know. I want to see Speaker 4 (4:48) that. We're Speaker 2 (4:48) going to see that in the Speaker 4 (4:49) documents. Speaker 2 (4:49) Yeah. And also, remember, there was talk of $100 billion run rate or $100 billion in 2026, like revenue. That's where that ARR and all these kind of reported numbers were going around. And when you think about it, to get to that $2 trillion valuation, you would think, Maybe you do start to need to see something up in that direction. So I guess let's get into the compute commitments in just a bit. But I want to know, where do you think their revenue is going to end up? What kind of numbers do you think they're going to show about the current state of the business as opposed to 2025? Because, come on, who remembers 2025 so long ago? Speaker 4 (5:30) No, it's very important because, you know, if that number doesn't look like it's continuing to go exponential, a lot of these big numbers become very scary. So, for instance, Anthropic recently, I think it was Anthropic, you know, told the New York Times. I mean, we obviously it's like sources close to the matter, right? Was it Anthropic? Was it one of their investors? Probably one or the other. Told the New York Times that it was going to be at 100 billion annualized revenue. at the end of the year, by the end of the year. So, you know, you would assume that this year they're going to hit, you know, somewhere between 50 and 100 billion when all is said and done. You know, if they can do that, then spending 500 billion is less daunting than if they're at 10. But we don't know. And I think you're right. When we end up seeing those numbers, it's going to matter a lot for most of the year. Remember, they've been at something like 45 to 60 billion ARR. At least that's what we've been told. Right. So I think they're definitely growing, but the rate that they're growing is going to matter a lot. And this is something that Dario has kind of addressed. Right. He's talked about this with Dwarkash, for instance. He talked about it with Andrew Ross-Forkin. I think he and I had a bit of a conversation about it when I was there last year, which is that. The company has to make these projections of how much compute it's going to need years out. And there's one risk, which is that you buy too little and you can't serve the use case and your competitor has a lot, which is the story that's been told recently because OpenAI seems to have more compute and is going YOLO in the words of Dario and able to meet that need. But the other thing is, if your revenue isn't able to grow to meet your commitments, careful or not, if you cannot meet these commitments and 80 % of them are not cancelable, your company goes bankrupt. And that is the state of Anthropic. And, you know, I wrote about it today in Big Technology, and I called it a leap of faith that Anthropic is taking everybody on. And it really is this leap of faith because the economy today is dependent on Anthropic and OpenAI meeting these commitments. And if they're not able to, you know, not only is this going to be bad news for Anthropic, which will go bankrupt if it can't meet these obligations, but there is going to be a cascade because the amount of money that they've pledged to companies like Alphabet, like Amazon, and like Microsoft, not to mention NVIDIA, is massive and factors into these companies' projections. Speaker 2 (7:57) Well, okay. I do agree. These are massive commitments. Speaker 2 (8:04) Will they be able to pay them? And like, what does that actually mean for their financial future? But I don't think it means they go bankrupt. Like, actually, if we outline how this plays out, even again, 80 % of that overall compute commit is non-cancelable. But in reality, if this starts to have some kind of cascading effect, do you not think the lawyers are going to get involved and everyone's going to realize? And anthropic, this is, again, too big to fail type stuff relative to. the Broadcom, the Alphabet, the Amazon, the Microsoft, the people who they have the commitment to also have a very strong vested interest that this does not all collapse. So do you think they would like drive Anthropic into bankruptcy just because that's the nature of the original contract? Speaker 4 (8:53) Well, okay. So that was Dario's words. Maybe I was, you know. Wait, Speaker 2 (8:57) did Speaker 4 (8:57) he say Speaker 2 (8:58) YOLO? Speaker 4 (8:59) He said YOLO as in OpenAI is YOLOing. There Speaker 1 (9:02) are some players who, you know, who are Speaker 2 (9:05) YOLOing, who pull the wrist dial too far. And I'm very concerned. Who is YOLOing? So that's a question I'm not going to answer. He Speaker 4 (9:13) said there are others that are YOLOing and we're trying to be careful. Right. And but but he you know, he used like basically these terms that, yeah, we're going to go bankrupt if we can't because we're signing binding obligations. Look. Of course, if you're Amazon, which you have a big investment in Anthropic, right? A lot of these, this is, by the way, it goes back to these discussions we've been having the entire time. The circular financing, right? The investments, the compute deals, right? It's all tied in together. So if Anthropic goes bad, yeah, I don't think Amazon's going to let them, you know, go bankrupt. But it will be irrevocably bad for Amazon and for Anthropic. So listen to these numbers. The commitment, the spending commitments that Anthropic has to Alphabet, which is a shareholder, is $111 billion over the next decade. To Amazon, it's $110 billion. And to Microsoft, it's $31.4 billion. You remember seeing like these earnings numbers of these cloud businesses? Now, of course, that's spread over time. But we see these earnings numbers for these cloud businesses, and a part of it is selling direct to their customers. But a lot of the growth that we're seeing is coming from their dealings with the open AIs and Anthropix and the health of these companies. Like pre-AI, for instance, AWS was growing at like 17 % consistently a year, which like on a big base is nice, but the company could not increase its growth rate. That has boomed. It's in like the 30 % range, which is just crazy given its scale. So of course, if Amazon saw Anthropix doing poorly, You know, it would try to make a deal to save the company, save its, you know, save its ability to continue to sell its technology, save its investment in the company. Same with Alphabet. I don't doubt it. So, yeah, bankruptcy might not happen, but it might not take a bankruptcy to have a cascading issue in our economy. And this is what I really want to speak with you on, John, because you've you've been on the trading floor. You've seen economic collapses. I don't think we're heading towards an economic collapse. Speaker 4 (11:14) But I think we have to talk a little bit about the dependence of the broader market on the financial performance of the anthropic IPO, of the open AI IPO, and the companies more broadly. So I wrote about this in Big Technology today, Anthropics IPO and our collective leap of faith. Today's public markets and much of the economy depend on AI's continued growth. The S &P 500 is currently experiencing its worst breadth since the dot-com bubble. With the median stock trading 16 % below its 52-week high, even as the index is up around 13 % this year. NVIDIA has been holding it up, adding more than a trillion in market cap in 2026, and half of the S &P 500's earning per share growth this year is coming from AI investment, according to Goldman Sachs. Steve Ratner put a chart up talking about this. You know, the S &P 500 is near a record, he says, but if you strip out the AI companies, it's down 5 % since late August. Right. So this is kind of what it comes down to. Anthropic has made these big commitments and we finally got a chance to see the number with this S1. And it has to make good on them because we have this like crazy breadth in our market where many of the companies in the S &P 500 are down significantly off their highs. You're not seeing any growth from them. The growth is concentrated, again, in big tech, mostly in the AI trade, in companies like NVIDIA and in these big tech companies. And should the anthropic story or the open AI story, for that matter, begin to wobble, you could see a cascade here. Speaker 2 (12:51) Okay. So let's think about how this plays out. Because, again, I... I think we're actually agreed that the magnitude of these compute commits to the Amazon's metas and hyperscalers actually present as much risk to the hyperscalers as they do to Anthropic. It's actually, if Anthropic can't pay, that's really bad for meta Google, especially Broadcom, NVIDIA, and these others. So I think they need to be worried about this. They need to kind of start trying to understand. I don't know, like there is so much energy behind this trade. There's so much vested interest in capital that, you know, everyone has this interest and so much of the energy around marketing AI and pushing AI. And I say this as someone who strongly believes that it's going to transform everything over time. But like all of it like has to be done by this especially kind of concentrated group of companies in order to keep this trade propped up. I think we should get into are there kind of like cascading effects? Is there actual kind of like large scale economic turmoil? But I think to start, what does it actually look like in terms of anthropic? Do we think them having an S1 that does not excite the market is the trigger? Do we think it's six months from now? Growth slows, growth is flat, everyone starts to question compute commits, which then has a follow-on worry around Amazon's cloud earnings, etc. How do you see it playing out? Assuming Anthropic does not have just ridiculously good numbers that just saves everyone and we're all okay. Speaker 4 (14:41) I think it could be. I mean, here's the thing. SpaceX... set the precedent. Now, of course, SpaceX is a very different company. It's not pure play AI, but it went out very strong, of course, and has kind of had some trouble since, even