Anthropic’s AI bubble ‘YOLO’ warning

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

Dario Amodei took the stage at the DealBook Summit on Wednesday to throw punches without naming names.

The Anthropic CEO spent a good chunk of the interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin drawing a careful line between his company’s approach and that of a certain competitor. When asked about whether the AI industry is in a bubble, Amodei separated the “technological side” from the “economic side” and then twisted the knife.

“On the technological side, I feel really solid,” he said. “On the economic side, I have my concerns where, even if the technology fulfills all its promises, I think there are players in the ecosystem who, if they just make a timing error, they just get it off by a little bit, bad things could happen.”

Who might those players be? Despite Sorkin’s prodding, Amodei wouldn’t name OpenAI or Sam Altman. But he didn’t have to.

“There are some players who are YOLOing,” he said. “Let’s say you’re a person who just kind of constitutionally wants to YOLO things or just likes big numbers, then you may turn the dial too far.”

He also touched on “circular deals,” where chip suppliers like Nvidia invest in AI companies that then spend those funds on their chips. Amodei acknowledged that Anthropic has done some of these deals, though “not at the same scale as some other players,” and walked through the math of how they can work responsibly: A new gigawatt data center costs roughly $10 billion to build over five years. A vendor invests upfront, and an AI startup pays back its share of the deal as revenue grows.

While he again didn’t name names, he referenced the eye-popping numbers OpenAI has been trumpeting for its compute buildout. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that in principle,” he said. “Now, if you start stacking these where they get to huge amounts of money, and you’re saying, ‘By 2027 or 2028 I need to make $200 billion a year,’ then yeah, you can overextend yourself.”

The heart of Amodei’s argument was a concept he’s been using internally: the “cone of uncertainty.”

He said that Anthropic’s revenue has grown tenfold annually for three years, from zero to $100 million in 2023, $100 million to $1 billion in 2024, and now somewhere between $8 billion and $10 billion by this year’s end. (Sam Altman, by comparison, has said that OpenAI expects to end 2025 with an annualized revenue run rate exceeding $20 billion.) But even Amodei doesn’t know if Anthropic will hit $20 billion or $50 billion next year. “It’s very uncertain.”

That uncertainty is concerning, he explained, because data centers take one to two years to build. Decisions on 2027 compute needs have to be made now. Buy too little, and you lose customers to competitors. Buy too much, and you risk bankruptcy. Amodei added, “How much buffer there is in that cone is basically determined by my margins.”

“We want to buy enough that we’re confident even in the 10th percentile scenario,” he said. “There’s always a tail risk. But we’re trying to manage that risk well.” He positioned Anthropic’s enterprise focus, with higher margins and more predictable revenue, as structurally safer than that of consumer-first businesses. “We don’t have to do any code reds.”