Monetizing AI: Anthropic's $5B Windfall

0:28Hi, Uncle Lazer here. You're listening to a podcast right now. Driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're into podcasts, chances are you have something to say too. With RSS.com, starting your own is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and hundreds more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads like this, even with just 10 listeners a month. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, This is your sign. Start free at rss.com. Big news out of Anthropic. They just released a statement saying that they have accepted$5 billion in investment from Amazon and have pledged back$100 billion in cloud spending.

1:17Big, big amounts of money, big article. Lots of news to talk about here. So we're going to talk about that today. Before we do, Jayden, why you tell them about our school community? Every single week, Jamie and I record a bonus piece of content in our school community. This week, I do an entire breakdown of how I use the new Claude design tool to create a brand new software or a brand new website. It's a media company that I'm building. It basically is going to take every podcast we record here and I have three other podcasts that I host. So every podcast I record, it's going to grab the transcripts and make articles about those news stories.

1:50And it'll throw quotes from the podcast inside of the articles as well. I'm super excited about it. It's an awesome project, but I use Cloud Design to do the whole thing, and I make a tutorial about that. But we also have almost 100 other videos breaking down how we're using different software tools to actually grow and scale our businesses, make money. We show the financials. We show revenue. It's basically everything we don't share publicly. And we have like 300, almost 300 members inside the school community, so lots of other people to bounce ideas off of and see where the puck is moving in the industry.

2:19So if you're interested in that, it's only$19 a month. We wanted to make this cheap so basically anyone could sign up and get access to all the insider info. You can go check it out on our school community. All right, let's talk about Anthropic and this$5 billion that they've taken from Amazon. And in addition, we also have news from just a while back that Anthropic passed OpenAI in revenue, and apparently they're spending about four times less money. So I think both of these are wild stories. Anthropic apparently has hit$30 billion in annual recurring revenue run rate, So not actual annual recurring revenue, but it's like basically the run rate and annual recurring revenue thing means like from today, their run rate would be$30 billion.

3:04But it's not like they've actually like they're not actually making that much money total. It's just if everything they have today keeps up, they extrapolate from today for the rest of the year. But anyways, whatever. It's an accounting thing. And this is up from$1 billion in January of 2025. So a little bit over a year ago, they were at$1 billion and they're now at$30. That is an absolutely colossal run. OpenAI is at about$25 billion in annual recurring revenue. Now, there is some drama on how we are calculating these numbers that we'll get into, but I guess just right off the bat, Jamie, what are your thoughts about Anthropic passing OpenAI?

3:42It's an absolutely insane statistic. I never thought, I always thought OpenAI was untouchable, but I really think the key here in my opinion, is the positioning of Anthropic versus OpenAI. OpenAI is, you know, geared towards maybe the everyday person searching up things. Maybe they're looking for the best product to buy where Claude has from the beginning been primarily a tool, a business tool for coders, business developers, things like that. And so I think they're positioning as basically we can replace one or multiple employees with your$200 subscription, paying$200 seems like almost like a no brainer where I could never picture myself paying the$200 a month for open AI because that's not really what their, their value proposition is.

4:35You know what I'm saying? So, um, when they were releasing these really cool new tools, it was fun to pay maybe for a month. I know you paid the 200 bucks for open AI for one month to test out Sora when it came out. But aside from that, there's really not a lot of value proposition there where anthropic it's like we're gonna we can replace teams of people essentially for 200 bucks so um anyways what are your thoughts on it yeah i 100 think you agree there they captured a really interesting industry they first went off of went for coders which already was a really high paying job and so coders are like well i'm getting a lot of value out of this it's worth paying 200 but then they moved into actual job functions with called co-work so any white collar worker can use it but they're kind of built on the back of all of the reasoning that their code product had um because code you know is it turns out is a really good way to to think about the whole world when you're doing step-by-step processes so i think that they've done a phenomenal job their growth revenue is absolutely crazy so they're founded in 2021 in 2022 they made 10 million dollars in 2023 they made 100 million dollars in 2024 they were at $1 billion.

5:41In 2025, they were at$9 billion. By the end of the year,$9 billion in basically annual recurring revenue. And so far in 2026, they're at$30 billion as of April. So$9 billion to$30 billion. I mean, that is just an absolute explosion of growth. And I think 100 % this is being driven by Claude Cowork, which by the way, OpenAI could have dominated this. No doubt in my mind, OpenAI could have dominated this because OpenAI had chat GPT agents like a year ago, and I tested them and I paid$200 a month to get access to it. And their agents just weren't good enough. They just couldn't do what you wanted it to do is the computer use it couldn't click on things enough.

6:21I would tell it how to do something to get stuck every five minutes, it would ask me to like intervene, or it asked me like, do you want me to continue? And I'd be like, yes, continue don't ask me. It just wasn't good. So I just obviously I'm not going to pay$200 a month for I'm going to have to babysit. Claude Cowork, on the other hand, when they finally got around to launching that product, I tell Claude Cowork to go build an entire website and it builds the whole thing. I go review it and I'm like, oh, I don't like this, I don't like that, go tweak this or that. But like it does the whole project in one shot.

6:48It sets up my servers, it sets up my domain registrar, it sets up my database. Like it literally does everything for me or it goes and scrapes all the data that I need from a bunch of different sources, puts them in a spreadsheet and uploads them to a dashboard for me. Like those are taking me tons of time. So yeah, things that I used to have literal job roles to do at AI Box, Cloud Cowork now does. And a lot of automations that I've been able to build with Cloud Cowork. So I'll use Cloud Code to build a tool that then automates that job function. So it's like I'm seeing literal real job function replacement and company growth from this tool.

7:22Yeah,$200 a month, of course, I'll pay that like, I don't care. I want every single employee at my company to have a$200 a month subscription to this thing, because I know that it's going to make them 10 times more productive. And so that's the value proposition for enterprise. That's why Anthropica is growing like crazy. It's not because like random users are paying for it. It's because business users and businesses are paying for this for their employees and white collar workers are paying for this where they see like$200 a month saves them so much time and makes them so much more productive.

7:50And that's just not something you see with average consumers that might ask ChatGPT, hey, like give me some advice on like a health question I have or help me generate a cute picture of my dog. Then I'm gonna pay$200 a month for that. Absolutely, yep. So let's go back to this story about the Amazon investment in Anthropik. And Amazon pledged$5 billion, which is crazy. So Amazon's total investment up to this point in Anthropik is up to$13 billion. But Anthropik in turn has planned to use Amazon Web Services for their cloud computing data centers, things like that, to the tune of$100 billion over the next 10 years.

8:28So I think it's kind of one of those things, again, where you sort of have circular investments here. It's like, I'll invest in you if you invest in me kind of thing. And there's been some speculation around that as far as like, is this an AI bubble? But in this case, I don't think that really applies. Jaden, what are your thoughts on the investment side? Yeah, you're right. It is interesting. AWS and Amazon have kind of been one of the oldest investors of Anthropic. I mean, I remember when they first reported that they were going to do a$4 billion tranched investment in Anthropic a couple of years ago.

8:59And I was like, oh my gosh, that's so much money. That's insane. And then you literally have Sam Altman that just went out and raised$120 billion or$110 billion funding round for ChatGPT, I guess, two months ago. And then we're just like, well, I guess you can just raise over$100 billion in funding for your for your company if like, that's what you want to do. So anyways, it is interesting. Anthropic always felt like the underdog in a sense that they couldn't get as much money as OpenAI could get in their funding rounds. And yet they're making so much in revenue, that it sort of solves the problem, right?

9:36Like, and the other interesting thing is, OpenAI, I think is actually is burning way more money, and which is why you see them cutting back on models like Sora. You see them trying to refocus. They said they're going to go after the coding component. And to OpenAI's defense now on the whole thing with Anthropik passing them in how much money they make, I've heard a lot of people say that the way they calculate revenue is different and so that it's not actually passed. And OpenAI, in a specific thing I saw, said the only reason why Anthropik looks like they're making$30 billion is because they had an$8 billion one-time deal with a company.

10:14I need to do more research on what exactly that was. But I mean, without that, they'd be at 22. But I mean, even if they were at 22 instead of 25, they have raised and they spend four times less money on training runs than OpenAI. So like, and they've raised way less money. So to be fair, it seems like a way more capital efficient company, which is probably gonna win it in the long run. Yeah, and apparently there's more to this deal than just cloud data centers. It's a big part of this is actually Amazon has these custom chips that they're developing, one called Graviton, which is a low-power CPU, and then Tranium, which is an NVIDIA competitor in AI accelerator chips.

10:54It seems like there's more than just data center investment here. It has to do with the chips as well. Have you heard anything on that, Jaden? Amazon basically has a great strategy here. They have some chips that they want to, and we've actually seen this played out by Microsoft, his exact same strategy. Basically, these guys, they have their new chips, they have their infrastructure, they want to make sure that it's industry standard and it's good enough for everybody. And so by partnering with someone like Anthropic, I mean, Amazon's done this from day one, partnering with Anthropic, so it's really smart on their part.

11:21They get Anthropic to not only test their chips, but it's also kind of like the biggest credibility statement for any other company wanting to train an AM model. They're like, look, Anthropic is using our chips to train their models. It's good enough for you, right? And Microsoft did the same thing with OpenAI when they gave them$10 billion in the early days and it was like, oh my gosh, that's so much money. A huge part of that deal was just Microsoft being like, and OpenAI is training everything on Microsoft Azure and using our infrastructure and they're optimizing their infrastructure for exactly what OpenAI needs, which means they're optimizing it for what the entire industry needs, an industry that is spending an insane amount of money.

11:55So it makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I think Amazon's got great chips, but I think it's an even better deal for them to have working on something with Anthropic, where Anthropic is going to help them optimize those chips, optimize the infrastructure, and kind of be the poster child so everyone else is going to pay them a lot of money too. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, hey, if you enjoyed this episode or got any value out of it, we would really appreciate a rating or review. Wherever you're listening, we really appreciate those and they help us reach more people. I'm trying to get to 100 reviews on Apple Podcasts.

12:26So if you're listening on Apple, please drop some stars for us. We'd really appreciate it. And then also be sure to check out our school community if you want to learn how to use some of these tools to actually make money and grow your business. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time. John Daly here. You know what day it is? Neither do I. I live life daily. That's why I only spend on Moto Casino. Moto's got daily free bonuses, daily tournaments, new slots added daily, and the best part, guaranteed daily jackpots. You can't beat that. So today's the day you're gripping to spend it with me on Moto, America's social casino.

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