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Start free trial →The Indicator (Planet Money) · Money & Markets · November 2026
The hosts were discussing the circular deals of the AI economy, after noting how much Anthropic has committed to spend with Amazon on computing. Ricky Mulvey lays out why this is not a normal company relationship.
No matter what, you protect the shareholders, Wayland. So this company has some big questions moving forward. One, can Anthropic keep growing its sales to pay for all of the servers, chips, and cooling systems that it plans on using?
And how does the AI circular economy fit into all of this? For example, Anthropic owes Amazon $110 billion over the next 10 years because it is buying computing power from it.
But it's not a normal company relationship here. Amazon is one of Anthropic's suppliers. Amazon is also one of Anthropic's customers. Amazon is also an investor and also potentially a competitor to Anthropic as well.
Where does it begin? When does it end? No evidence of wrongdoing here, but a unique, very unique arrangement. And so it's like there's a host of companies where like there's multiple relationships with Anthropic.
And the biggest question for Anthropic's supporters and really society is: can this company create artificial general intelligence? Or in this case, AI models that are able to improve all by themselves without much human involvement?
Kevin with Machine Gods says that reaching this level is possible and would fundamentally change the economy.