Anthropic raises $13B Series F

The compute moat is getting absolutely insane. We're basically at the point where you need a small country's GDP just to stay in the game for one more generation of models.

What gets me is that this isn't even a software moat anymore - it's literally just whoever can get their hands on enough GPUs and power infrastructure. TSMC and the power companies are the real kingmakers here. You can have all the talent in the world but if you can't get 100k H100s and a dedicated power plant, you're out.

Wonder how much of this $13B is just prepaying for compute vs actual opex. If it's mostly compute, we're watching something weird happen - like the privatization of Manhattan Project-scale infrastructure. Except instead of enriching uranium we're computing gradient descents lol

The wildest part is we might look back at this as cheap. GPT-4 training was what, $100M? GPT-5/Opus-4 class probably $1B+? At this rate GPT-7 will need its own sovereign wealth fund

In this imaginary timeline where initial investments keep increasing this way, how long before we see a leak shutter a company? Once the model is out, no one would pay for it, right?

You can't run Claude on your PC; you need servers. Companies that have that kind of hardware are not going to touch a pirated model. And the next model will be out in a few months anyway.

If it was worth it, you'd see some easy self hostable package, no? And by definition, its profitable to self host or these AI companies are in trouble.

I think this misunderstands the scale of these models.

And honestly I don't think a lot of these companies would turn a profit on pure utility -- the electric and water company doesn't advertise like these groups do; I think that probably means something.