This is an excerpt from Source by Alex HeathA newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated to The Verge subscribers only once a week.
Dario Amodei took the stage at the DealBook Summit on Wednesday and threw punches without taking names.
The Anthropic CEO spent a large portion of the interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin drawing a careful line between his company’s vision and the vision of a certain competitor. When asked if the AI industry is in a bubble, Amodei separated the “technical side” from the “economic side” and then twisted the knife.
“On the technical side, I feel really solid,” he said. “On the economic side, I have my own concerns, even if the technology delivers on all its promises, I think there are players in the ecosystem who, if they make a mistake in timing, they get a little bit carried away, bad things can happen.”
Who could those players be? Despite Sorkin’s prodding, Amodei did not mention OpenAI or Sam Altman by name. But he didn’t have to do this.
“There are some players who are yellowing,” he said. “Let’s say you’re a person who constitutionally wants to YOLO things or just like big numbers, you can turn the dial too far.”
He also talked about “circular deals,” where chip suppliers like Nvidia invest in AI companies that then spend those funds on their own chips. Amodei acknowledged that Anthropic has done some of these deals, though “not on the same scale as some of the other players,” and ran through the math on how they could operate responsibly: It costs about $10 billion to build a new gigawatt data center over five years. A vendor invests upfront, and an AI startup returns its share of the deal as revenues grow.
Although he again didn’t name names, he did mention the astonishing numbers that OpenAI is publicizing for its compute buildout. “Now, if you start stacking these up where they get huge amounts of money, and you’re saying, ‘I need to make $200 billion a year by 2027 or 2028,’ then yes, you can overextend yourself,” he said.
Central to Amodei’s argument was the concept he was using internally: the “cone of uncertainty.”
He said Anthropic’s revenue has grown tenfold annually in three years, from zero to $100 million in 2023, $100 million to $1 billion in 2024, and now between $8 billion and $10 billion by the end of this year. (Sam Altman, by comparison, said OpenAI expects the annual revenue run rate to exceed $20 billion by the end of 2025.) But even Amodei doesn’t know whether Anthropic will reach $20 billion or $50 billion next year. “It’s very uncertain.”
He said this uncertainty is worrying, because it takes one to two years to build data centers. Decisions on calculation requirements for 2027 have yet to be made. Buy too little, and you’ll lose customers to competitors. Buy too many, and you risk going bankrupt. “How much buffer I have in that cone is basically determined by my margin,” Amodei said.
“We want to buy enough that we can be confident even in a 10th percentile scenario,” he said. “There’s always a risk. But we’re trying to manage that risk well.” He described Anthropic’s enterprise focus as structurally more secure than consumer-first businesses, with higher margins and more predictable revenues. “We don’t have to do any code reds.”
