Anthropic raises $13B Series F

Impressive round but it seems unlikely this game can go on much longer before something implodes. Given the amount of cash you need to set of fire to stay relevant it’s becoming nearly impossible for all but a few players to stay competitive, but those players have yet to demonstrate a viable business model.

With all these models converging, the big players aren’t demonstrating a real technical innovation moat. Everyone knows how to build these models now, it just takes a ton of cash to do it.

This whole thing is turning into an expensive race to the bottom. Cool tech, but bad business. A lot of VC folks gonna lose their shirt in this space.

I was convinced of this line of thinking for a while too but lately I'm not so sure. In software in particular, I think it's actually quite relevant what you can do in-house with a SOTA model (especially in the tool calling / fine tuning phase) that you just don't get with the same model via API. Think Cursor vs. Claude Code -- you can use the same model in Cursor, but the experience with CC is far and away better.

I think of it a bit like the Windows vs. macOS comparison. Obviously there will be many players that will build their own scaffolding around open or API-based models. But there is still a significant benefit to a single company being able to build both the model itself as well as the scaffolding and offering it as a unit.

CC being better than Cursor didn't make sense to me until I realized Anthropic trains[0] it's models to use it's own built-in tools[1].

0 - https://x.com/thisritchie/status/1944038132665454841

1- https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/agents-and-tools/tool-use...

It still doesn't make sense. Cursor undoubtedly has smart engineers who could implement the Anthropic text editing tool interface in their IDE. Why not just do that for one of your most important LLM integrations?