What backfired?

Ant's recent rise has little to none to do with retail subscribers, it is Claude Code with Opus 4.5+, followed by their Mythos stunt

I would say the flood of $20 Claude Subscribers due to news cycle backfired on them, now everyone is getting worse outputs and exposed their shortage on compute, which they can't fix anytime soon.

Pretty much everyone I know has both cc and codex now, just because how unreliable cc has become.

Alphabet makes $30 billion profit per quarter.

It was enough for me to dig much deeper into OpenAI, where before we almost exclusively used them for services with any form of SLA.

Is the simpler explanation that Alpha was already an investor and Anthropic has been making strides in their business model?

Actually I have the opposite take. This is largely a play to procure compute capacity (and I suspect, distribution via Google Cloud), and I think Dario wildly underestimated the amount of demand they would see.

I always wondered why Anthropic was not out there feverishly scrambling to procure compute like the other big players. While Altman was being laughed at as a "podcasting bro asking for trillions in investment" Dario was on Dwarkesh expounding on how tricky it is to predict the demand for capacity. Now Dario has to give equity to a competitor to get compute. (OpenAI does this too, of course, but I suspect the terms are much better.)

At this point, it's pretty clear that compute is the only moat in this business. Even as an outsider, the extreme demand curves and compute crunch were painfully obvious, so this seems like a serious strategic error on Dario's part.

"(And how competently Dario has played his hand.)"

lol hes barely done anything, but sometimes that is all that's necessary when a bozo opponent is hell-bent on screwing things up. He didn't get fired the first time for no reason.

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