I think the amount of turmoil around these deals is giving more weight to the possibility that we’re in a massive bubble thats quite divorced from any kind of fundamentals. Sooner or later the bubbles gonna burst.
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Anthropic ARR went $1B -> $4B in the first half of this year. They're getting my $200 a month and it's easily the best money I spend. There's definitely something there.
It makes me perhaps a little sad to say that "I'm showing my age" by bringing up the .com boom/bust, but this feels exactly the same. The late 90s/early 00s were the dawn of the consumer Internet, and all of that tech vastly changed global society and brought you companies like Google and Amazon. It also brought you Pets.com, Webvan, and the bajillion other companies chronicled in "Fucked Company".
You mention Anthropic, which I think is in a good a position as any to be one of the winners. I'm much less convinced about tons of the others. Look at Cursor - they were a first moving leader, but I know tons of people (myself included) who have cancelled their subscription because there are now better options.
Yes, there's (maybe?) four, but they're at the very bottom of the value chain.
Things built on top of them will be higher up the value chain and (in theory anyway) command a larger margin, hence a VC rush into betting on which company actually makes it up the value chain.
I mean, the only successes we see now are with coding agents. Nothing else has made it up the value chain except coding agents. Everything else (such as art and literature generation) is still on the bottom rung of the value chain.
That, by definition alone, is where the smallest margins are!