Dario’s Choice and Anthropic’s Future, Apple’s AI Devices, Netflix Loses WBD

22:22Dario Amodei:Mass surveillance of U.S. citizens? No thanks. Seems like a reasonable second red line. That's it. Those are the two showstoppers. Painting a bullseye on Anthropic garner spicy headlines, but everyone loses in the end. This should never have been such a public spat. Should have been handled quietly behind the scenes, scratching my head over why there was such a misunderstanding on both sides about terms and conditions of use. Something went very wrong during the rush to roll out the models. Let reason and sanity prevail. I mean, that seems like a pretty reasonable take.

22:56M.G. Siegler:It does. But again, I think that maybe it was a trickle down effect of the Maduro situation coming into this, knowing that the government, knowing that they're going into this situation and not wanting to, you know, for this to come up. Like, say that these attacks started and Anthropic got wind that their models were being used via Palantir or whatnot. And, you know, they just start to raise like this giant PR campaign against the government for doing that. Now, you might say that that would backfire against them, and it could have, but it's sort of a who knows how it would have exactly played out in that case.

23:31M.G. Siegler:But I'm just trying to game through like what the government was thinking here in terms of like why engage this ahead of time. Again, either it's that they viewed it as a point of leverage over Anthropic leading up to this, that they knew that they could get maybe – or they thought that they could get more of what they wanted out of Dario leading up to this. Or again, that they wanted to sort of cover themselves for if and when they went forward with this and using these models. But again, you point to the other stuff, which is – there's the multilayers here. It's not just war game scenarios and things like that.

24:03M.G. Siegler:It is the mass surveillance stuff, which obviously Anthropic cares about. And you would be hard pressed to find people who would be on the other side of that, right? Like to your point on the general's comments, like everyone sort of is on the – not everyone, of course, but like a lot of people I think would be on the side. But the government's pushback against that at least to date has been like we just don't want Anthropic to have de facto say over anything. It's not like that they're saying like we want to mass surveil the, you know, the American populate and they would say like the laws are already in place against that.

24:36M.G. Siegler:Like obviously there's gray areas with all of this stuff, but like they just their stances. We do not think that a company should have de facto say over what, you know, what we would do in situations. And again, we're not going to the plan is not to mass surveil the U.S. But again, these are they're slippery slopes, which is what Anthropic would argue, I would assume. And so you can just go back and forth and continually will go back and forth over those issues.

25:03Dario Amodei:And I would I would still hold that they should have come to a deal, but they didn't. And so now the question is, what happens next? So, as I mentioned earlier, the Pentagon has labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk, which, as I understand, it means no federal government. agency can work with Anthropic after this six-month deadline. Not only that, private companies working with the government on certain contracting work cannot use Anthropic for that work. So by the way, like if let's say you're a Boeing, you may not want to have a certain model that your engineers use for government work and a different model that they use maybe for commercial work.

25:45Dario Amodei:You want to have standardization. So this is a potentially very big hit for Anthropoc, not just the$200 million contract that it had with the Pentagon, but this is a potential billion dollar, multi-billion dollar hit if the Pentagon does go through with this designation. Would you agree?

26:05M.G. Siegler:I totally agree. It's not just, as you said, the contract itself, it is the trickle-down effects and the broader ramifications of if they lose that distinction. And again, like it might just, yeah, it puts a chilling effect on new contracts that are signed, right? Because it's like, what if some other company is thinking about like, oh, we might do a government contract one day. And to your point of like, would we rather just use one model like, you know, to sort of do all of our work? Or would we really want to have to swap out Anthropic for open AI if, um, if we do go forward with this government contract.

26:41M.G. Siegler:And to that point, like, I do think that the two sides you, you hear, you know, there's been subsequent reporting that like, there's still some talk that they want to, you know, figure out how to make this work again for nothing else. Maybe if, if we still have this six month window, like where they're going to be using, uh, the anthropic models, like you, you, the six months are probably going to be pretty intense in terms of what's going down from, you know, the war perspective. Yeah. A lot of tokens being used. And so they probably do want to find a way to hash things out. So like the hope obviously is that cooler heads prevail.

27:15M.G. Siegler:Maybe once this initial wave of, of the, of this, you know, these attacks are, are sort of behind us, hopefully that they can, you know, sit down again and maybe hash out the legalese as we were talking about. And like the exact wording of like how to go forward with this because yes it's it's bad for anthropic if if they get ripped out of the u.s government as they're talking about right and we should say that the supply chain threat is

27:39Dario Amodei:not something that's typically used for domestic companies right it's typically like right it's

27:44M.G. Siegler:chinese it's like all the threats that were used against huawei and all the chinese companies and it's wild that this is and that's like so it's the the sort of backdrop behind all of this right now Now, I noted this earlier, but a number of people have seen this. Claude is now the number one app in the App Store, which is wild. And it's very clearly related to some of this. Yeah, right? It's not just that – obviously, it's been doing well. Anthropic has been doing well with the new Opus models that have rolled out and Co-Work and Claude Code and whatnot. But some of this is certainly virtue signaling, if nothing else, right?

28:22M.G. Siegler:Like people are saying like, oh, yeah, we want to be on the side of the AI company that is pushing back against the government that's trying to mass surveil or or in the headlines, at least. Right. Like that's the way that it's being portrayed. Who does that remind you of?

28:35Dario Amodei:Tim Cook, 10 years ago, one month, 10 years, one month ago was the time that he sent that memo out about standing up to the FBI. And Apple's basically capitalized on that for the last decade.

28:48M.G. Siegler:Yeah. And so, you know, it's Anthropic running a similar playbook to that. I mean, maybe not explicitly, at least right now, like not doing PR campaigns, that would be pretty, you know, not in great taste to do that at the moment. But still, like, again, it doesn't seem like it's completely unrelated that Claude is shooting up and people and they're sort of thinking of that. This might be Anthropic is positioned as the company. That's going to be the quote unquote moral one. And, you know, that's a whole obviously hornet's nest of of a topic as well.

29:19Dario Amodei:That's right. I will give my hot take here, which is that this supply chain risk threat never manifests, just never takes effect. Again, it's a six-month deadline. We've seen six-month deadlines a lot from the U.S. government. Often it's been around TikTok. Oh, we'll ban TikTok in six months. Yeah, we'll extend it for another six months. if if anthropic is this pivotal uh for um for the government uh then they will just continue to use it and extend this or rescind it or it won't hold up in court so that's hot take one the other side of it though is i've already heard some rumblings from government like big companies that are government contractors that they will preemptively take anthropic out of uh their workflow or at least are highly considering it because they don't want to bank on the fact that this will get extended.

30:15Dario Amodei:So even if this isn't going to go through completely, I do anticipate that it will hurt Anthropic when it comes to these private companies.

30:26M.G. Siegler:I agree with you, but I would also just say like I wouldn't fully discount the notion that we talked about already, but that these two sides just don't like each other from the personnel involved, right? Like every indication seems that way. And so like, is there, are they going to be able to get past sort of the grudge between the Trump administration and Dario basically? Um, or is there some intermediary that has to come in to sort of assuage that, um, in some ways, because yeah, like the tick tock thing and everything else like, um, you know, the sort of the taco stuff, right? Like Trump always chickens out of like the things that he threatens and goes back upon.

31:09M.G. Siegler:Um, is this another one of those? And again, it feels like, yes, it probably will be, except if they view it like that they want to make a sort of, you know, make, make some sort of points about a more philosophical points and high level point about, um, you know, quote unquote, woke companies or companies that are, that are misaligned or, or that they view as misaligned with sort of the American public and the electorate and all that. And, um, you know, they may dig in their heels a little bit more because of that.

31:38Dario Amodei:Yeah. I do think taco really did apply, uh, with the tariffs, but maybe after this Iran thing, it's going to be tougher for that label to stick. Um, maybe the entire intermediary that comes in is Sam Altman? Or maybe not.

31:51M.G. Siegler:I mean, he swooped right in.

31:54Dario Amodei:This is from the Times. You know, as these discussions were breaking down with Anthropic, Emile Michael had an ace up his sleeve. On the side, he had been hammering out an alternative to Anthropic with its rival OpenAI. A framework between the Pentagon and OpenAI had already been reached. Mr. Altman of OpenAI got a call, got on a call with Mr. Michael to discuss a deal for his company. Within a day, they had drafted the framework. OpenAI agreed to the Pentagon's requirement that its AI could be used for all lawful purposes, but it also negotiated the right to put technical guardrails on its systems to adhere to its safety principles.

32:30Dario Amodei:At 10 p.m. on Friday, as Anthropics lawyers began working on a lawsuit against the Pentagon, Mr. Altman was on the phone with Mr. Michael finalizing the details of OpenAI's deal with the Department of Defense. Mr. Altman then posted the news of the agreement on social media. On Saturday, Altman invited people to ask him questions on X about the deal as OpenAI faced a backlash for swooping in. He goes, we don't want the ability to opine on a specific legal military action, but we do really want the ability to use our expertise to design a safe system. Basically the same. Very similar deal to the one that Anthropic could not agree on with the Pentagon.

33:11Dario Amodei:Your thoughts on open AI's role in this whole situation? Classic, I guess.

33:16M.G. Siegler:I mean, this could a hundred percent, this could have been predicted, right? Like, uh, you see, you see the opening, Sam Altman sees the opening, Sam woman's going to take that opening and he is going to, to immediately ring up a meal, Michael and get, get him on the, get him on the line and figure out a way to sort of, uh, swoop in there and not only potentially take over all these contracts, but also obviously he's positioning, he's trying to position this as like, they are the peace broker here, right? Like that they are the ones who are, who are going to sort of, uh, iron out these differences between Anthropic and the U S government by cutting their own deal that paves the path, uh, to sort of do a new deal going forward.

33:56M.G. Siegler:But I think that they wouldn't mind if say they got all those contracts instead of Anthropic got all those contracts going forward as well. And so, you know, that part was maybe left out, but, uh, but they're the peace broker and, and they're going to come in here and, and make everything. I mean, again, this was so predictable and it was also predictable, the backlash to it. Right. Because like, no one believes that like two blood rivals that won't hold hands on stage, uh, at, at an event are going to, uh, you know, one is going to help out the other in a major way. Now, to be fair to, to Sam Altman, like he might think at a high level, like, yeah, I think we should probably take a stand on this.

34:34M.G. Siegler:That's more in line with what Anthropic is, is trying to project at least at the highest level, but still we're going to do that in a way that's, that's good for the business at the end of the day. And so, you know, both things can probably be true, but again, the optics around this are just not great. And you know, again, to be expected there.

34:54Dario Amodei:I got a text as this was all unfolding, where Sam had said something like, we don't want Anthropic to not be able to work with the government. And someone sent me this text like, oh, well, it looks like OpenAI is really changing their tune on Anthropic. And I was like, I don't think so. Wait and see. And there they were. So it could be a potential very lucrative deal for OpenAI, and especially if this thing goes through. And OpenAI, by the way, in the middle of a year where they're really emphasizing enterprise, they could potentially swoop in and get much more than just that one contract.

35:32M.G. Siegler:I would just one last thing I would add to this because I was going over it today, trying to look through some of the numbers for ownership stakes. I like to do is like a hobby of these, these AI companies, given the ownership stakes in Anthropic from that, we know obviously from Google and Amazon, but now Microsoft bought in right famously and NVIDIA too. And so, you know, don't don't necessarily underplay those elements to it as well, especially someone like Amazon, right, who has lots of government contracts as well and Google, too. If they can sort of step in and be a bit of an intermediate intermediary here and say, you know, like, look, cool.

36:09M.G. Siegler:We got to pause on this. Like, we can all work together. We can all get along. You can figure out how to use these models in ways that both sides sort of figure out. because again, like it does ding also their businesses, those big players, if all of this gets ripped out.

36:26Dario Amodei:Yeah, by the way, I mean, Amazon just did this$50 billion funding deal with OpenAI. So you know it's 15 first, 35 next. So maybe they might just say, all right, creative destruction.

36:38M.G. Siegler:They're hedging, they're always hedging. So they're fine either way, I guess, but yeah, wild.

36:43Dario Amodei:All right, so could Amazon and OpenAI work on a potential device together to go against the Apple and Google alliance. And where is Apple's AI device bet going? That's where we will pick up when we come back right after this. You want to eat better, but you have zero time and zero energy to make it happen. Factor doesn't ask you to meal prep or follow recipes. It just removes the entire problem. Two minutes, you get real food, and you are done. So remember that time where you wanted to cook healthy but just ran out of time? You're not failing at healthy eating? You're failing at having three extra hours every night.

37:22Dario Amodei:Factor is already made by chefs, designed by dieticians, and delivered to your door. Inside, there are lean proteins, colorful vegetables, and healthy fats. It's the stuff that you'd make at home if you had the time. There's also this new muscle pro collection for strength and recovery. You always get fresh and never frozen food. It's ready in two minutes and there's no prep, no cleanup, and no mental load. Head to Factormeals.com slash BigTech50off and use code BigTech50off to get 50 % off your first Factor box plus free breakfast for one year. The offer is only valid for new Factor customers with the code and qualifying auto-renewing subscription purchase.

37:59Dario Amodei:Make healthier eating easy with Factor. If a driver in your fleet got in an accident tomorrow, could you prove what actually happened? Without footage, it's much harder. So your insurance rates spike and you're stuck paying for it. That's why so many fleets choose Samsara's AI-powered dashcams, clear video evidence, real-time alerts, and coaching tools that help prevent accidents before they happen. Samsara AI helps reduce crash rates by nearly 75%. For instance, the city and county of Denver saw a 50 % reduction in false claims against them and a 94 % reduction in safety events overall. This is the kind of visibility that every operation manager needs.

38:44Dario Amodei:Don't wait for the next accident to take action. Head to samsara.com slash big tech to request a free demo and see how Samsara brings visibility and safety to your operations. That's samsara.com slash big tech. Samsara. Operate smarter. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with M.G. Siegler of Spyglass. You can find it at spyglass.org. Highly recommend signing up for it, getting the newsletter. One of my favorite tech reads. All right, M.G., let's talk a little bit about switching gears from this big blow up. Yes, a calm, nice topic. Let's talk about Siri. Yes. or more let's talk about the devices that apple might be developing that will have siri or gemini or gemini powered siri baked in so recently we've gotten news that apple is going to release maybe three devices all at once smart glasses a pendant and airpods with expanded ai capabilities i've thought that i think we've both discussed actually that this is going to be a pretty good year for Apple.

39:51Dario Amodei:And when this news hit, I was like, I got to go to spyglass to get MG's perspective. And you started with a very surprising line at the beginning that maybe we're seeing the beginning of Apple, if not pulling ahead of the AI race, really starting to assert itself and make a strong play here. Let's talk a little bit about what you're seeing.

40:09M.G. Siegler:Yeah. So there's a few things that I think lead into fuel that idea. And, you know, this dates back to obviously when when Apple at WWDC two years ago now was gearing up to talk about AI in a real way for the first time. And obviously they ended up doing that and falling flat on their face because they couldn't execute upon it. But now in a way, it's almost like, are they going to run basically the same game plan, but now that they have the Google partnership for Gemini building these models, they can actually do it and execute on it in the right way? I wouldn't put it past them to sort of basically do that, do everything that they promised.

40:50M.G. Siegler:And then to your point on these devices, extend it a bit to sort of the world that we're entering now. I do think that they are potentially in a good position. We've talked about it before that if we believe that models are getting commoditized and if there's going to be diminishing returns and sort of spending billions and billions, hundreds of billions of dollars on training these large language models, like What's the next sort of step after that? And if you and if you're Apple and you believe that that is the case, that they don't need to train necessarily their own massive frontier models that they instead can partner as they're doing with Google on them, then the value might, you know, from their eyes come from the way that they implement them.

41:36M.G. Siegler:And obviously, a lot of their value has always been derived from selling devices, the best devices, many would say, to the public. And so if they can create these devices that leverage that – and by the way, like I do think the one key device to all of these things remains the iPhone. And I think that what you're seeing with these three devices that are being talked about that you put out there, you know, AirPods and glasses and a pendant, all of them, you know, per the report, per Mark Gurman's reporting, like would likely be reliant to some degree upon the iPhone. And that's where Apple has this unique advantage.

42:12M.G. Siegler:Maybe you could say that Google and Samsung have similar capabilities because of their device, their smartphones. But Apple has a very unique advantage. in, you know, certainly ahead of the metas of the world and others that are trying to create these types of newfangled devices, let alone any startup that's trying to do so and open AI in that bucket. Apple has this unique position where they have the iPhone in billions of pockets. And now they're going to have these devices that rely upon that as sort of at least for the foreseeable future as basically, you know, the central processing unit of those devices potentially.

42:49M.G. Siegler:And so you can close your eyes and not, it's not too hard to imagine a world in which Apple is sort of the device leader again, uh, in this new AI world. And if, if they're the device leader, who's to say they're not the overall leader. If they're the, the way that everyone's interfacing with AI.

43:03Dario Amodei:Okay.

43:03M.G. Siegler:At least I'm about, yeah.

43:04Dario Amodei:So I want to talk through this because, you know, I've recently started, I've gotten like the first wearable that I actually use frequently, which is this Garmin watch, which is not an Apple product. Uh, but actually works quite well with the iPhone. There's this Garmin app. It mostly connects. I only had one situation where I've had to like reset the whole thing because the Bluetooth connection was off. And this is basically like these AI devices probably wouldn't exist in their own ecosystem. For instance, when you want to set up the metaglasses, you set it up with the smartphone. But it's still, it syncs pretty well.

43:39Dario Amodei:And there's technologies that have come out that lets you like sync data through Wi-Fi that have made it much more seamless. So if the iPhone is going to give an advantage to Apple's AI devices, how does its interoperability, which has always been Apple's calling card, how does that help in a way that would be that much better than, you know, the ways that these current wearables are connected?

44:06M.G. Siegler:So it's a good question. It's hard to know for sure without obviously seeing what Apple's going to release out there. But I would just point to, you know, comments made by no less than Mark Zuckerberg over and over again about complaining nonstop about how they don't get the full level of interoperability that they would like with Apple's products, right? And some of that is obviously just a little bit of posturing because those two sides don't like one another. And And obviously, MetaFamously doesn't have a smartphone play. And so they're telling regulators that, look, you need to make sure that the iPhone is as open as can be to third-party products like perhaps the ones we're making and others are making.

44:43M.G. Siegler:And obviously, Europe is very open to that notion. They've basically installed some laws in various places to make it so that they have to be more interoperable and allow low-level system integrations that Apple may not want to. And again, your question, though, like what's going to be all that different from the, you know, at the day to day level, it might not be all that different. But I do think that there's lots of low lying under under the hood stuff, you know, potentially as as as boring as like slightly longer battery life because Apple is able to, you know, more tightly hone the way that the connection is made between their device and the iPhone.

45:23M.G. Siegler:And I think there's all different sorts of things, background syncing, context syncing, all this type of stuff that can come into play that you might not think on a day-to-day level as you're using it is like that big of a deal. But there are advantages that Apple has. And the question will become probably both – certainly in Europe, but I think it will ultimately become true also in the US of like how much of that is too much of a competitive advantage and that they're hurting competition as a result of that. And that's, we're going to hear a lot from Mark Zuckerberg and probably some others, maybe Sam Altman as well about that going forward.

45:56Dario Amodei:So we're going to have, it seems like these are all coming at the same time. Smart glasses, a pin, and, and these enhanced AirPods. What do you give the chance of being the most successful of those three?

46:12M.G. Siegler:I would imagine, I mean, I do think that they'll all be slight for slightly different purposes. I would imagine price will be a key factor in that as it always is. But like if I had to guess, I would think that the AirPods would probably be the most successful just because you and I are wearing them right now. Everyone's wearing them out and about like they're a known thing. As long as they don't look entirely ridiculous and different with some sort of camera sensor on them, I think that they will continue to be obviously a very popular product. it's a matter of again how much do they cost if they add a camera sensor to it is it a 500 product all of a sudden do they can they keep it like at 300 or something around there i think that will matter a lot glasses obviously meta has already sort of proven somewhat of a market but relative to apple's other products like it's a drop in the bucket it's not very big uh you know the meta ray-ban products are not huge compared to say airpods or apple watch or anything else And so can Apple take that to another level?

47:14M.G. Siegler:I think that they'll have success with it. But we're now seeing already there's starting to be backlash preemptively against Meta because they're talking about using facial recognition within the glasses, right? Adding that after the fact. And so we're all of a sudden right thrown right back into the glass hole situation from Google Glass a few years ago. And and Meta has has to their credit sort of avoided that to date. And now we're getting thrown back into that. And how does Apple deal with something like that? If Meta is, you know, for lack of a better word, sort of poisoning the well or the market by thinking like, I don't want any glasses with any sort of camera on your face.

47:50M.G. Siegler:And obviously Apple's product will have that to some degree. And then the pen in itself, obviously, you think to humane and, you know, ex-Apple engineers and designers who were working on that didn't end up being successful, of course, and sold to HP and a fire sale, it seems like. But Apple has that unique advantage of having the iPhone itself. And it sounds like this would maybe be more of a, I think German even said it was like an internal phrasing of it as the eyes and ears maybe of the iPhone going forward. And so you wear it around and it's constantly just looking at things. Again, this is a privacy thing though.

48:26M.G. Siegler:But Apple's, as we're talking about, Apple is in the unique position to be more trusted than probably any other tech company, certainly from a privacy angle. And so, yeah, there's all those elements to it. Right.

48:39Dario Amodei:Yeah. I think the AirPods, that's my bet. I think we're going to see a battle of these AI devices in the earbud space. But it does seem you're right. Like we're just kind of, we are sort of doomed to just be videotaped by everybody at all. Although we kind of already are.

48:53M.G. Siegler:So I still like, like looking at us, you know, right now wearing these AirPods, like I've always been curious, like how they're actually going to do that though, from a pure product perspective. It's like, so I have a beard. If like there's stems, you know, feature the camera, like, does it just record my beard, like looking forward or do they have to stick out more than as results? And that will look ridiculous. You know, everyone joked when the AirPods first came out, how ridiculous, you know, they thought they look because they're sticking out of your ears. But like ultimately they're pretty streamlined and you can't really tell all that often when you're looking at people and we got used to it very quickly.

49:28M.G. Siegler:But if you got cameras sticking out of them and then there was like talk where it wasn't like – it wasn't necessarily camera cameras but was more IR cameras and was used like to potentially capture motion and things like that to help with gesture control of different devices and things. And that made a little bit more sense to me. But I am very curious like how they end up doing that. But there was also talk that they were going to put a camera in the watch and that you would have like, yeah, like almost like a Dick Tracy style, like a camera that you would like shoot people with, like looking at looking at your wrist.

50:00M.G. Siegler:And so all these things are going to create situations where you just need new cultural norms to come in. And again, Apple has done much better than any other company. But to Meta's credit, they have done well with the Ray-Bans so far.

50:13Dario Amodei:That's right. And I think the battle will definitely fall on whose assistant is better. and Siri has to get better. I mean, it feels like beating a dead horse at this point, but we didn't even talk about it because it's so regular that Siri got postponed again or features within Siri got postponed again. You had a really funny piece about that. You said it's almost like Apple's having some major issues with their AI implementation and strategy. They should probably look into that, but it just keeps happening, right? That this keeps getting delayed and you start to lose faith over time, even with the Google partnership, that they're going to be able to figure this out.

50:52M.G. Siegler:Yeah, I was always like a little bit skeptical. I mean, I've obviously been super skeptical of Siri over the past 15, having used it over the past 15 years. But like when they announced a Google partnership, I was always a little bit skeptical of the initial rollout because it's like, how are they going to it's sort of what we're talking about with the government. Like, right. Like you can't just swap these things in. It may seem like it's that simple, but like there's a lot of like underlying things that need to be connected. Look at Amazon for an example of that. Right. Like, look how long it took them to rework Alexa, to be able to work with things like Anthropics models and all the models that they're using behind the scenes to sort of upgrade Alexa.

51:27M.G. Siegler:It took over a year, and they promised something, and they couldn't deliver on the timing of it. And now we're seeing the same thing. We've seen the same thing play out with Apple. It just takes a long time to get like all of the little pieces in place because the last thing Apple can afford to do right now is put something out there even in beta, I think, even in some sort of, you know, like thing where it's any forward-facing, user-facing service and just have it flop again. That would be just a death knell, I think. They would have to change the Siri name at that point. You would have like Siri, we might have the Microsoft style like funeral where they would be like walking down Cupertino with with a coffin and series in it because they would need a new a new branding if they fail one more time with this.

52:08Dario Amodei:Yeah, I think it's long past past time to do that. Could Amazon and OpenAI be the competition here? I mean, we talked about it before the break, but Amazon is going to invest 50 billion in OpenAI. Now, of course, OpenAI has a device program underway. Apple has I mean, Amazon has the Echo. I think Alexa Plus is actually already pretty good. Could you see as part of that deal, because OpenAI will be helping Amazon develop some specialized AI technology, that this could also be part of a counter? It could be a team battle, OpenAI and Amazon against Google and Apple.

52:45M.G. Siegler:Yeah, that's sort of where my mind went when I was reading about these reporting. And again, like$50 billion. Yes, it's over like two tranches, it sounds like, you know, 15 and then 35. but still$50 billion that Amazon is investing in a time when they're making cuts or famously doing layoffs, right? And they're getting dinged left and right for their CapEx spend. $50 billion is no joke. And they're spending that for a reason, obviously, with OpenAI. And so you have to, my mind again, went to wondering, is this some sort of massive play to get all of the models in-house to, you know, a lot of, there's a lot of talk right now about orchestration and the idea that like, um, like perplexity and others are now trying to like move their businesses into being these layers on top of the LLMs to be able to do whatever you, you as a user shouldn't have to worry about which model picker and things like that.

53:38M.G. Siegler:You should just let it, uh, say what you want and let a service pick the best one for you. And obviously that's harder within Amazon because as you noted, they make their own product in Alexa. But given that they have the Anthropic partnership, and now given that they have the OpenAI partnership, is there a world in which they're using all those models behind the scenes? And sort of they can use that to counter both Apple and Google potentially, where they say, like, look, if you're using those products, you're only going to get in both cases, Google as a result, because they're both using Gemini.

54:08M.G. Siegler:But, you know, they're using their in-house models. Whereas if you use Amazon, if you use Alexa, maybe going forward, you know, you will have the power of Claude, you will have the power of ChatGPT, and you'll have the power of Alexa, all three, you know, on top of maybe some others that they add in there as well. And it's sort of a playbook that they've run right with the cloud in a way too, right? So it's like, they view it as like, you can pick which, which you want to use and, or let us pick which you think we should use from a product perspective. And so no, no, you know indications that that necessarily is going to be what happens but i wouldn't be shocked

54:47Dario Amodei:about that okay before we leave i definitely want to talk briefly about this netflix warner brothers paramount deal uh you've written about it we haven't talked about it on the show in depth really yet uh but the the cliff notes here was that netflix had agreed to buy warner brothers discovery which has cnn and hbo and was going to build this sort of powerhouse streaming company that may be the streaming company of the future by adding these old school assets. Netflix is obviously in the lead. No one really comes close to it in streaming. So this might just have solidified it as the dominant service.

55:22Dario Amodei:It reaches a deal with Warner Brothers Discovery. Paramount comes in and says, nope, we want to make the deal instead. We weren't given a fair chance to bid and just keeps throwing out these bids until it decides that it's going to end up, or both companies decide that Paramount will be the buyer and not Netflix. Warner Brothers Discovery is going to have to pay Netflix about a$3 billion breakup fee. And the final deal is going to be$110 billion or so that Paramount will pay for Warner Brothers Discovery, whose market cap, as you note in Spyglass, was$20 billion a year ago. So just give us your perspective on what happened here and what the implications are.

56:07M.G. Siegler:Yeah. So it does seem like on one level, at the highest level, this is just a masterful job by David Zaslav, who's the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, because he was able to take a company, as you noted, that a year ago was a fraction of what this offer is in terms of market cap and still is right now. and turn it into this offer. And they basically did that by, at first, it was Paramount that came out with an offer, much lower offer than what these current offers are. It's, I believe,$19 a share, and we're up to$31 a share now with the newest one. And I think the wild card there was Netflix coming in because Netflix was viewed as obviously a big player and the biggest sort of, if you want to call it a media company, the biggest one.

57:00M.G. Siegler:Its market cap is roughly double that of Disney. And so they obviously have the capital to be able to do whatever they want and to deal like this. But they had not historically done anything like this. And so I think that, you know, Paramount basically felt like they came in and stole this from under their nose. And there is a question of, was this the, you know, Masterstroke by David Zaslav sort of orchestrating this whole thing, knowing perhaps that Netflix, that Paramount basically needed this more than Netflix did. And so they were going to drive up the price to make it so that Netflix would walk away with their$3 billion all cash consolation prize, which is a pretty nice offer to, yeah, it's about what they make in profit a quarter.

57:40M.G. Siegler:And so they just got that in one fell swoop. But still, yeah, this, this deal has gone back and forth and back and forth. And now the fact that Netflix walked away relatively quickly, once the Paramount offer came in, you know, kudos to Netflix for it seems like had good discipline. They weren't going to get into some sort of bidding war and go outside of their bounds. But also like, I'm just overall sort of sad for Hollywood because I do feel like that they didn't like either of these deals, but I think that they're going to be in for a bigger world of pain with the Paramount deal than they would have been with Netflix.

58:15M.G. Siegler:And we talked, you know, you could talk about, yeah, the streaming dominance of Netflix and whatnot. But the reality, in my view, at least, is that this is much more about like the future going forward. And the future is going to be Netflix versus YouTube and a few other, you know, key players. I think Prime Video will be in there. Um, Disney plus obviously, but like, it's not just a tick tock and which, uh, has, uh, interesting new ownership given this, uh, this paramount structure as well. And so all of these players in there is really the battle going forward. And we're talking about like this decaying sort of industry that in, in movie going, which is an industry I love, but it's not like a giant growth industry.

58:52M.G. Siegler:And so we're talking about like these players, battling over these assets. And it feels like, you know, Netflix would have been a good safe haven for a for a studio that's like been owned by conglomerates for 100 years. This isn't like a new thing. Everyone's all afraid because we're in the world of tech now and and AI is coming and all this. But like, Netflix would have been a pretty good safe haven, I feel like for this. And instead, we're just going to get a straight down the middle sort of combination of two studios. And that's just going to be a lot of layoffs. And it's going to be just this brutal sort of, you know, decline over a longer period of time.

59:25Dario Amodei:Right. And I'll note that Netflix is up 26 % in the past five days. So clearly the market has really digested this and said, yeah, probably better that you didn't do the deal. I thought maybe it would be good. Like maybe it would be nice to roll all this content up. Obviously as a consumer, you're not happy about that because you have less choices. But from a business perspective, I understand why Netflix was interested, but obviously different way market likes it and everyone will just move forward. Yeah, we'll see until, until like, there's going to be a lot of fallout from this.

1:00:00M.G. Siegler:And I think it's going to happen both, both from, you know, the antitrust perspective, because, you know, the, of the, the relationship with, with Trump and the Ellisons and, and there's going to be a lot of different hearings on this type of stuff. And I think it'll play out over years and years because then they'll look back on it after it's approved and say like, was it approved for, you know, less than above board reasons. And so I think we're going to just hear about this for years and years and years. And the reality is, it's like, it is a bit sad. It just feels like, you know, obviously, Paramount's play is going to be to try to bulk up to compete with the Disney pluses and the Netflix's of the world.

1:00:34M.G. Siegler:But are they really realistically going to be able to do that? Maybe if they can leverage TikTok or something in some way, you know, now now owned in no small part by Oracle, maybe. But it feels more like that this is still a slow decay story. And they'll just sell their products, ultimately, the content itself to Netflix, just as they've been doing.

1:00:55Dario Amodei:All right, folks, the website is spyglass.org. MG, always great to speak with you. I'm so glad we got a chance to speak today, especially just, I mean, an incredible weekend of news that I think we're all still trying to wrap our heads around. And I'm so glad we got a chance to digest it here together. indeed good as always Alex alright thank you so much thanks everybody for listening and watching if you haven't if you could rate us five stars on Spotify or Apple Podcasts we'll go a long way to helping the podcast reach new audiences which would help us recruit guests and that would always be great so hope you do that hope you have a great Monday and the rest of your week and we'll be back here on Wednesday with another new interview I'm not quite sure who it will be but we'll hopefully touch more on the Anthropic Pentagon saga so thank you again for being here and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

1:02:10Dario Amodei:Michael Lewis here. My bestselling book, The Big Short, tells the story of the buildup and burst of the U.S. housing market back in 2008. A decade ago, The Big Short was made into an Academy Award winning movie. And now I'm bringing it to you for the first time as an audiobook narrated by yours truly. The Big Short's story, what it means to bet against the market, and who really pays for an unchecked financial system, is as relevant today as it's ever been. Get the Big Short now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.