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BE Benedict Evans Benedict Evans Independent technology analyst based in London, covering mobile, media and AI for over two decades.

“You have pricing power in the sense that an oil company has pricing power. There is shortage. I can name my price. But you don't have pricing power in the sense that people have to buy my oil and not their oil because it's all the same.”

Another Podcast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026

“You have pricing power in the sense that an oil company has pricing power. There is shortage. I can name my price. But you don't have pricing power in the sense that people have to buy my oil and not their oil because it's all the same.” — Benedict Evans, Another Podcast

Context

Evans is going through what Anthropic's S-1 does and doesn't tell us. He argues the leading models are close to interchangeable, and many customers already use two or three of them. His point is that today's scarcity-driven pricing says little about what the business will earn once supply catches up.

Transcript

Another Podcast Around 02:55 into the episode
Benedict Evans

Or something.

Toni Cowan-Brown

Nice and short and sweet.

Benedict Evans

…So you don't know where supply and demand are going to be in two and three or four years' time. Secondly, the models themselves are more or less commodities. And certainly if you're deep into this, as again, we've discussed, you can argue about, oh, well, Claude is better than Gemini for this. But in generality, everyone is looking at using two and three models and you don't have pricing power. You have pricing power in the sense that an oil company has pricing power. There is shortage. I can name my price. But you don't have pricing power in the sense that people have to buy my oil and not their oil because it's all the same. And yes, sorry, I know different kinds of oil are different. But like the point here is that, okay, these are pretty fungible systems. And so you don't know where supply and demand is. Right now, you don't have differentiation on your own terms. We don't know if that will change. We don't know if a winner-takes-all effect will emerge. This is why people talk about recursive self-improvement.…

Toni Cowan-Brown

Is there anything in the document that you read as, okay, well, this actually makes sense and this is the reality as it is today? Or does everything feel like a lot of this is guesstimations? Because they have to be.

Benedict Evans

Oh, so the numbers in the thing now, I mean, these are all audited numbers. I mean, the numbers are the numbers. The point is that this isn't, you can't really draw straight lines from this and say, well, this is what's going on. And I think it's very kind of instructive to compare this with, as…

Toni Cowan-Brown

What are you going to compare this, Tim? I'm intrigued.

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

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