Things Tobias Mann Has Said on Podcasts

“What has gotten missed somewhat in the more rosy interpretations of the S-1 is that they also are signed up to have to repay upwards of eight hundred billion dollars and counting of compute commitments out through the next two decades or so.” — Tobias Mann, The Register Kettle

Tobias had just noted that, for the first time, Anthropic's revenue outpaced its compute expense two to one, which has made some observers more confident. This is his counterpoint about the long-term obligations disclosed in the filing.

The Register Kettle · 2026-11-02 Permalink → Listen →

The Register Kettle Around 06:42 into the episode

Brandon Vigliarolo

say it was one two point one point two billion, I think, for what, the first half of the year or or same time last year or something like that. With so so it's gone down. Yeah.

Tom Claburn

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and it's what it's what they're Yes. going they're they're trying to go out at two trillion now? Is that the that that the the the number?

Tobias Mann

Well, the number depends, on whether they're they're going to be able to sustain this. I was gonna mention for the first time ever, their revenues outpaced their compute expenses two to one. this has never been true in the the company's history, and it's one of the reasons that people are feeling more confident about this. The the issue that really comes from all of this is that And and what has gotten missed somewhat in in the more rosy interpretations of the S one is that they also are signed up to have to repay upwards of eight hundred billion dollars and counting of Right. compute commitments out through the next two decades or so.

Brandon Vigliarolo

Yeah, you outlined in your story just a whole host of people they owed billions of dollars to for compute. you know, and you like you said, you know, it would be great. That sixteen point three billion in profit would be great if those compute costs were gonna hold steady, right? But they're not…

Tom Claburn

Yeah. yeah, and and the big there's a big question mark in terms of, you know, what the technology does for inference costs, because I think a lot of this is betting on, you know, you'll be able to get the the same hardware that is much more efficient down the road and Mm-hmm. maybe not drop your…

Tobias Mann

Per token, yeah.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

“Anthropic's business is predicated on the idea that more compute means more revenues. However, the disconnect is: can revenues scale fast enough? Is there enough user base? Is there enough token demand to cash the checks they've already written? And it does really look like a house of cards. And they warn about this in the S-1, they have to, that if their revenues can't keep up with their compute commitments, they could default.” — Tobias Mann, The Register Kettle

The hosts were picking apart Anthropic's IPO filing, and the idea that its pitch boils down to "bigger is better." Tobias lays out the risk he sees in the company's compute commitments, noting the filing itself warns of possible default.

The Register Kettle · 2026-11-02 Permalink → Listen →

The Register Kettle Around 15:11 into the episode

Tom Claburn

…does it hit the the big companies? I don't know. I mean you the all the cloud providers look pretty happy because they get business regardless. I mean even if Google's Google's AI models are not, you know, num you know first in people's minds, they're still serving all of this stuff. Same thing.

Brandon Vigliarolo

…even months or in August, they were saying the same thing. Microsoft was saying that token maxing doesn't factor into the way they want to do business. Right. So you got two very big consumers of AI who are basically saying, y'all need to slow it down and be more purposeful. So bigger, you know.

Tobias Mann

Yeah, and Anthropex business is predicated on the idea that more compute means more revenues. However, there's the disconnect is can revenues scale fast enough? Is there enough user base? Is there enough token demand to support the scale they need to pay the chec you know, to cash the checks they've already written? and and the it does really look like a house of cards. And they warn about this in the S1, they have to, that if they can't, if their revenues can't keep up with their commute compute commitments, they could default. And that default could turn into a cascade where Mm-hmm. they if they can't pay one bill, they can't get enough compute to generate revenues that are necessary to pay the next bill, and it all falls apart.

Brandon Vigliarolo

Yeah. And I feel like if it happens to anthropic, right, the other AI frontier labs are not far behind, because that's that's gonna be a symptom of a larger problem. Right. And that's that people are basically saying what a lot of non AI companies or companies that do AI along with other things…

Tom Claburn

Right. Yeah, and and a lot of the enterprise AI products that you see now are about trying to, you know, figure out ways to reduce that cost too, you because they don't want to run, you know, the fable, you know. twenty four seven, so you've got a a way of you have some sort of gateway or or…

Tobias Mann

Yeah. actually to Tom's point, Cadence Systems, which does a lot of electronic design automation and circuit board layout and that kind of thing, just rolled out a new product line called Maestro that's currently built around NVIDIA's Nemotron, OpenWaights models. But the idea is that they had been…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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