Zvi Mowshowitz
AI analyst and rationalist blogger who writes weekly roundups on language models, their uses and harms, and catastrophic AI risk, alongside posts on housing, ed...
“Anthropic has been incredibly conservative, in my opinion, on its forward commitments and its acquisition of compute. OpenAI has been much, much more aggressive. And still, OpenAI proved to be more conservative than it would have been optimal to be. … The cost of not having the compute available when you go really well is very high. … The only way this works out badly for them is if the price of compute actively goes down substantially, so they can't resell it, and there's no demand for it. And that is a very strange world that I do not expect.”
Complex Systems with Patrick McKenzie (patio11) · Startups & Venture · November 2026
Context
Patrick had framed Anthropic's roughly $800 billion of forward compute commitments as equivalent to debt that could sink the company if demand slows. Zvi says the real mistake across the labs was committing too little, not too much.
Transcript
…any more than we should charge for Dario's stock going up in value and therefore having been a more valuable thing to give to Dario. There's a very silly way to do accounting. And then the actual expenses that we have to look forward to are Anthropic has compute commitments of roughly $800 billion.
…to having $800 billion of debt, just like it would be if you had $800 billion of real estate leases. And that could cause, quote unquote, the bankruptcy of the company if demand growth slows or yada yada yada. I have reasons for not thinking that, but what's your perspective on the forward commits?
…slash how dead they would be as a company in terms of their like plausible amount of quality future if Grove had in fact stalled for various reasons, that they were now falling out of the top tier and were not able to make these sales. That didn't happen. But if it had, it is not clear to me that not having bought enough compute would have saved things that were that valuable. Whereas like the cost of not having the compute available when you go really well is very high. Obviously, there are reasons to want to be risk reverse, but I do think they played it too conservatively, even though from an outside perspective, you know, oh, 800 billion dollars are forward commits, that's completely insane. That's over a number of years. Compute is growing rapidly. AI is growing rapidly. The only way this works out badly for them is if the price of compute actively goes…
Hideyo, folks. So a bit of a post-interview rift on this topic. There's an old saw: if you owe the bank $900, you have a problem. If you owe the bank almost $900 billion, the bank has a problem. What does a future look like in which the buyer is unhappy about the $900 billion in forward commits?…
Yeah, I think of lab compute spend as roughly divided in half between a combination of internal use, pre-training, and post-training on the one hand and serving the models on the other.
Yeah. And so hypothetically in the future, if demand for inference goes up, keeping compute constant, you can adjust for that by saying, okay, well, we'll accept. Some slowdown with regards to our next model release, or like shoot for less in terms of adult-down capabilities, or yada yada. And if…
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