It's more than that, supposedly Sama donated another 25mil through a PAC.

I'm sure the Crypto AI Czar (David Sacks) being a major Anthropic hater didn't hurt either

Or that Kushner put a billion in OpenAI recently

EDIT: wow they got in at a huge discount too and OpenAI bought stake in Thrive...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/thrive-capital-bought-shares-in...

https://openai.com/index/thrive-holdings/

Quite tangential, but this reminded me of a line from Human Target:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6tqvzt?start=872&mute=fal...

"I'm sorry, you... You think I'm a prostitute?"

looks at offered cash

"A $40 prostitute?"

Not really. They get 25m here, 25m there, a little off the top over there, a crypto pump and dump once in a while, and they end up with billions.

While the specifics may differ, this is neither their first time doing a deal like this nor will it be their last.

It’s a lot of money for a “what have you done for me lately?” scenario

Like, this is opex

That's something that has bothered me about this entire administration, particularly the bizarre and disturbing involvement of the Diablo-cheating billionaire.

Everyone knew that a lot of politicians have been for sale, but I didn't realize how cheaply they were for sale. Musk able to buy his way into being in charge of an idiotic department with basically no regulation while still being allowed to CEO like five companies, and he did it for like $100 million. That's a lot of money, more than I'll ever be worth, but it's way less than I would think it would cost to buy the presidency, in charge of billions (and maybe trillions?) of dollars of sales and contracting.

There is no need for such derogatory language, sex workers would be deeply offended that you compared them to the Trump apparatus.

In this context they're not the whores, they're the johns. Trump / the PAC would be the whores, but what else is new?

It's a loss-leader. Once the patronage system has solidly taken hold, then they raise the prices. Our only consolation is that the fascist-supporting techbros are going to be victims of their own enshittification dynamic - they think they're paying customers, but they're actually the product. The autocracy will continue to increase its meddling to maintain its own political legitimacy. Moldbug's enlightened benevolent monarch who needn't care about politics is a pipe dream.

A whore doesn't have to charge any given john very much when they can service a large number of them.

> 25M isn’t even that much money. Not only are they whores, they’re cheap whores.

I don't know, Anthropic is providing 10K open source developers with $200 subscriptions to their bot, for up to 6 months. 200 * 10000 * 6 = $12 Million total. That's even cheaper, I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from all this.