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TM Tobias Mann On The Register Kettle

“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.”

The Register Kettle · November 2026

“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

Context

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.

Transcript

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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