The Path to $50 Billion: Anthropic's Strategy

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Anthropic is in talks to raise $50 billion at a $900 billion valuation, and this would push it past opening AI for the first time ever in its valuation. And I think in some of the private markets where employees or other people are trading shares on the secondary's market, Anthropic is already ahead, and technically the revenue is already ahead, although opening AI says that that's a technicality due to some one-time deals. Regardless, this would be the first time if it actually is executed, the Anthropic raises above what opening AI was able to raise. In addition, AWS launched OpenAI's Frontier Models, Codex, and their Managed Agents on Bedrock today. This is also the same day that Microsoft's exclusivity deal expired, so there's some drama going on with Microsoft and OpenAI. And actually, I think this is going to get… Well, a lot of people are going to be using OpenAI that weren't before because of a couple of things happening here.
Also, we have tech layoffs. We've just cleared 40,000 people laid off in April. We have year-to-date layoffs of over 96,000, all primarily being attributed to AI. Whether AI is the official cause or not, I think isn't as clear. This is what everyone's kind of pointing towards. And there's a couple of different reasons, and a couple of things that I think people should be doing if you were just laid off, or if you're at a company that's doing these types of layoffs. There's a couple of things that I will highlight that I think are actionable items. Okay, in addition to all of that, on the April 29th earnings night, Alphabet shares rose 6%, Meta fell more than 6%, Microsoft and Amazon both fell 3%. We're gonna get into why, and there's some pretty wild reasons. First things first, let's talk about the AWS and OpenAI deal. What actually happened is that OpenAI's GPT 5.5 and also GPT 5.4, both of them are alive on Bedrock, in addition to their Codex platform and some of their other interesting things they have with their Agent Harness, all of this is going to be put on to Bedrock. Now, the reason why this is kind of big news, because it's like, okay, great, it's like on another cloud platform. I think a lot of people don't understand that Microsoft Azure had an exclusive deal where OpenAI could only be on Microsoft Azure because, you know, Microsoft put $10 billion in and kicked off this whole, you know, wild AI feeding frenzy when ChatGPT first launched. And so OpenAI has been stuck over there. I actually think a lot of the problems that OpenAI has faced, including the fact that Anthropic kind of soared past it with a lot of people using Anthropic and developers in particular and enterprises in particular, using Anthropic and Anthropic kind of beating them in revenue. I think a lot of this is the fact that OpenAI was stuck on a platform that was just not the default for a lot of enterprises. I for one know that, you know, my startup AI Box, we use AWS for everything. We can't, I mean, of course, we could just get an API. And so it's not the end of the world. We have OpenAI models on our platform, but we're built into AWS, and we couldn't switch to Azure if we wanted to without having to pay a big bill and doing a whole bunch of extra work. And so it just wasn't a big enough draw for us. And if a lot of the tools inside of OpenAI were exclusively over there, it just makes it so less people will use it. Moving it over to and creating this partnership with AWS, I think we're going to see a massive jump in usage. And it's actually interesting because I was recently talking to some people over at AWS who manage our account for AI Box, some of our sales reps and whatnot.
And they specifically have different deals and discounts that they were offering me to switch our usage off of our API onto just like they're getting the Anthropic credits directly through them. And I think they'll now do the same thing with OpenAI. So it's interesting for Amazon, I think this is a great deal for AWS. I think this is a great deal because they're kind of working this and I'm sure they'll have, they give you like $100,000 in free tokens, but then they'll go and maybe slightly mark it up or maybe they get a discount as a bulk rate from Anthropic or OpenAI. There's a bunch of deals that they can swing there.
So it's good for startups, but it's also probably really good for their business model and it keeps people embedded into their system. And I think they want to, they really want it to be coming through them. It makes them feel like a bigger customer to OpenAI and Anthropic. The reason why this is a big news deal is because the timing on it was pretty insane. The launch occurred one day after Microsoft and OpenAI's exclusivity deal officially ended. So the second it ended, they immediately were launched on AWS. There was even kind of this wild interview from Ben Thompson at Stratbury, where he basically did like a joint interview with Sam Altman and AWS CEO Matt Garman about the announcement. In that interview, Garman said enterprise customers want OpenAI on the infrastructure that they already trust, which is basically AWS alluding to the fact that their customers don't trust Azure. I wouldn't go so far as to say that, but I do think it's a funny jab from a competitor over at Microsoft. Okay, let's talk about the tech layoffs that have happened so far in April. We closed out with about 40,000 tech layoffs in this single month, according to Business Today's tally that they've done. The year-to-date tech layoffs are now over 96,000. There's a whole bunch of companies that have rolled them out, Oracle, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Disney, Snap, and according to Yahoo Tech, all of them have laid people off. Oracle laid off at least 10,000 employees on April 1st. That's about 6% of their 162,000 workforce.