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JF John Foley On Prof G Markets

“My issue with this IPO from the beginning has been that it is almost impossible to predict with any certainty where these revenue numbers are going to go. … They may be getting very close to or have passed what they described as the moment of dramatically accelerated progress attributable to AI, which is like when AI starts basically improving itself more broadly. And when that happens, then they are supposed to step on the brakes in certain ways to make sure that AI is being developed safely. What does that do to the revenue? It really is impossible to say at this point.”

Prof G Markets · Money & Markets · November 2026

“My issue with this IPO from the beginning has been that it is almost impossible to predict with any certainty where these revenue numbers are going to go. … They may be getting very close to or have passed what they described as the moment of dramatically accelerated progress attributable to AI, which is like when AI starts basically improving itself more broadly. And when that happens, then they are supposed to step on the brakes in certain ways to make sure that AI is being developed safely. What does that do to the revenue? It really is impossible to say at this point.” — John Foley, Prof G Markets

Context

Asked about the amended Anthropic S-1 and whether its roughly $200 billion revenue guidance for 2028 is believable, Foley points to a new risk-factor passage about AI improving itself. His point is that a commitment to slow down for safety is a revenue risk no one can price.

Transcript

Prof G Markets Around 07:55 into the episode
Speaker 1

…billion in the year 2028. So even if it's spending, you know, like $100 billion a year on computes, the revenue still exceeds that. The question, of course, is whether you believe it can hit any of these numbers or whether these numbers will start to look small the closer we get to those deadlines.

Ed Elson

…price reductions from Q2 to Q3. They're now coming out with these discounts, largely due to the open weight models that we've been seeing that have been kind of flooding the market coming from China. I mean, is $200 billion, is that reasonable? Should we take that seriously? What do you think? I

Speaker 1

…it seems, were quite small according to this new amendment, maybe like 3% of revenue in discounts. But really, and if they do make 200 billion, by the way, then a valuation of something like 1.4 trillion, which is kind of roughly in the ballpark of what we're talking about, wouldn't be ridiculous compared with companies like SpaceX, if you believe the SpaceX's valuation is the same too. But my issue with this IPO from the beginning has been that it is almost impossible to predict with any certainty where these revenue numbers are going to go. And we also have in this latest amendment some new tweaks to the risk sect, the risk factors section of the prospectus. Not huge ones, but things that remind you that there are some sort of unpricable factors that may weigh on this. The one that they've talked about in the latest edition is this idea that they may be getting very close to or have passed what they described as the moment of…

Ed Elson

One of the more interesting developments in AI over the past week was something that came from Elon Musk. He tweeted, someone had pointed out how Grokbot, which is basically SpaceX's AI chatbot, their agent, that it wasn't working. And someone tweeted about this. And then Elon responded to that…

Speaker 1

Yeah, like money is finite, right? So we're focused a lot on the spending, but someone has to pay for all of this stuff in order for it to work out. Like Anthropic has in its going in its favor rapid growth in what it calls enterprise business, what everyone calls enterprise business. So selling…

Ed Elson

Just looking at their compute costs in the current quarter. So in the first quarter of 2026, it was $3.3 or almost $3.4 billion. The next quarter, it was $5.6 billion. This quarter, it was $9.9 billion. So it's getting progressively larger, but also the revenue is expanding dramatically as well…

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

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