Anthropic’s New Model, the Robot Economy and Apple Health

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News. Bloomberg Tech is live from the heart of Silicon Valley with Ed Ludlow in San Francisco.

Ed Ludlow (0:22)

This is Bloomberg Tech coming up, Anthropic out with a faster, cheaper AI model as the startup tries to stay ahead of its rivals before its IPO. Plus, we speak with Adam Jonas of Morgan Stanley about SpaceX, Tesla and the robotics boom and what it means for US jobs and manufacturing. And Bloomberg reports Apple aims to take aim at whoop with its own screenless health and fitness tracker as the company adds new wearables technologies. I want to get right to our top story, Anthropic out with a faster, cheaper AI model as competition heats up ahead of its potential IPO. This is Claude Opus 5.5, which promises performance similar to its most powerful Fable model, but at a significantly lower cost. Bloomberg's Rachel Metz has the details.

Interesting timing on the release of this. What do we need to know here?

Rachel Metz (1:11)

Yeah, so Anthropic, what they're doing here, and we've been seeing this increasingly lately. They're releasing a model that they're saying is very capable, but it's also more cost efficient. We've been seeing as more and more companies are using AI from companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, they are realizing, wait, this can cost a lot of money. And some companies have even imposed limits on how much they're allowing people to do work. So this is an attempt, as you noted before the IPO, to say, hey, we can be a little more cost conscious with our technology.

Ed Ludlow (1:45)

Compared to the prior generation Opus 5, they're saying 40% cheaper. Pricing is $4 per million input tokens, $20 per million output tokens. Explain why the economics of that matters, when the generation models release like this.

Rachel Metz (2:01)

Sure. So when you're talking about tokens in and out, you're talking about things that you're putting into a model, like a prompt versus what the model is generating. And these costs, they may be lower, they may be different. I think it really also is important to keep in mind that it depends on what kind of tasks you're doing. Some tasks are going to be more computationally heavy than others. So results may vary depending on who the user is and what they're doing with it. It's not as simple as just looking at a chart to figure out, oh, this will cost me this much less or this much more.

Ed Ludlow (2:35)

Rachel, I want to go back to the timing of this. How normal is it for Anthropic to release different generations of Claude with some cadence? The backdrop is obviously in the last two weeks, the essay from Anthropic CEO, Dario Amadei, about pacing the frontier. But they've just released a new model, which there's an emphasis of performance on.

Rachel Metz (2:57)

Sure. So, I mean, as you noted, there's a few things going on there. They've got the IPO looming in the very near future as we and others have reported.

Dario Amadei also said, hey, we should pace the release of the most cutting edge AI. What they're doing here is releasing a model that is not comparable to their most capable, publicly available models right now. So it seems to fit in with those kinds of things. Both the IPO wanting to show investors, hey, we're still doing really important work here, and we're thinking about our customers, but also with pacing, how quickly they're releasing the most cutting edge things.

Ed Ludlow (3:38)

Boom, this is Rachel Metz on Anthropic's latest generation of core model. Thank you very much.

Sam Altman is taking his AI safety push to the United Nations just a day before he's set to attend President Trump's state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping. The OpenAI CEO is set to call for global AI standards today as the US and China kind of grapple with how much to manage the risks of increasingly powerful AI. By the way, Anthropic's Dario Amodei will also join that meeting via video feed. Bloomberg's Shireen Ghaffari is here with the details. We have a sense of Sam Altman, what he will say, what he will tell the UN Security Council. Try and summarize it for us.

Shireen Ghaffari (4:20)

That's right, it's in line with what Sam Altman and OpenAI have been saying publicly over the past few weeks, if not months, which is basically this idea of having some kind of global framework to set standards on AI safety would help AI companies make sure that their products are indeed not going to cause great harm to the world. And so of course, the UN being an international body is an apt forum.