How We Deal With Rogue AI

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
There is a persistent theme in AI critique that the people who are involved in AI aren't doing anything about the challenges that may arise. The latest to levy this critique is Bill Gates, who went so far as to say that he was shocked that he was the, quote, first one to say something about the risks of AI. And yet Gates' 6,000-word blog post and media tour came on the same day that we got nearly 130 pages of follow-up reporting on the OpenAI Hugging Face hacking incident. The incident in which a set of agents escaped their containment and hacked into Hugging Face's systems searching for the answers to a benchmark test that they had found nearly impossible without the answers has given us a chance to actually see what the specific and real problems of advanced agent systems are rather than just the imagined ones. As we move further into the world, where new policies, new guardrails, new social structures are going to be required because of AI, the best changes will be the ones we make based on what we're actually observing changing rather than just what we imagined would be the change.
The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Blitzi, Robots and Pencils, and HyperAgent. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Ad-free is just $3 a month. To learn more about sponsoring the show, you can send us a note at sponsors at aidailybrief.ai. You can also find a link to more information about our next executive training program for agents at aidailybrief.ai. There's a little banner on the top that'll send you where you need to go. That next cohort will begin just after Labor Day.
Today, in absolutely insane numbers that would have gotten you laughed out of the room just a couple of years ago, but which are now to some plausible, Anthropic is expected to tell investors that they have potential revenue of, wait for it, $30 trillion ahead of their IPO.
Sources told the Wall Street Journal that Anthropic will likely estimate their total addressable market at $30 trillion when they reveal their IPO paperwork in the coming months. Now, TAM is, of course, an elusive metric and it's one that is much more about storytelling and anchoring potential investors to how the company sees the future than it is to any sort of math equation. Almost inevitably, any theoretical TAM presumes both disruption of existing major industries as well as the creation of new industries. When Uber went public in 2019, for example, they listed their TAM at $6 trillion, which would at the time have represented all private and public transportation globally. In Anthropic's case, given that the US economy is about $33 trillion, this $30 trillion number would line up with Dario Amadei's purported belief, which for the sake of clarity has not been confirmed or denied that Anthropic could be the last private company on earth after AI takes over the economy. Paraphrasing their sources, the journal wrote that Anthropic's TAM is quantified by, quote, Looking at the full scope of work that could be completed with AI models. For a point of comparison, the journal noted that all 191 tech companies in the S&P 1500 brought in 2.4 trillion in revenue last year. Now, to some, this feels like a contest for who can say the largest number. SpaceX listed their AI TAM at 26.5 trillion during their May filing, describing it as the, quote, largest actionable total addressable market in human history. The vast majority of that was 22.7 trillion in enterprise applications. Dario will then one-up Elon if Anthropic does indeed list a 30 trillion-dollar TAM once they unveil their paperwork. And that appears to be just around the corner. Sources said that Anthropic is preparing to make their financial disclosure public in the next few weeks, which would set the company up for an IPO in late September or early October. As you might guess, a lot of the discourse was somewhat incredulous. Scaling01 on X shared a gif of space galaxies flying by with the caption, Anthropic defining their TAM.
KittenBeloved on X writes, Anthropic to perspective employees. We could pivot and send the stock to zero at any time because Dario gets the Ick. You need to be in this for the love of the game. You're not a gold digger, are you? Anthropic to investors. Our TAM is every human economic activity in the galaxy. New York Times tech reporter Mike Isaac summed it up, Either you buy into the argument that this will eat the economy or you don't. But the street no longer flinches hearing it.