Comment by rhubarbtree

If Anthropic does a down round, the US economy will crash. Not hyperbole.

The US economy right now is based entirely on the AI bubble. This is an indisputable fact if you examine GDP stats and equities.

That bubble is driven by (rational) over-investment in AI capacity. For that investment to continue, there must be demand for it.

The demand for that infrastructure essentially lies in the hands of a few businesses: principally OpenAI, Anthropic, Google.

The reason I highlight Anthropic is that without their advances in the last six months, the game would already have been up. Only via Opus 4.5 and 4.6 did the possibility of ROI look plausible. We are very much dependent on a handful of companies’ progress to keep this bubble going.

I’m not saying AI is bs, just that this is a bubble like others (for example, Victorian railways) and a down round would signal the end of the bubble.

So for an enemy of America, whether that be China or Russia or any other country, it is logical to target the AI bubble to cause an economic crash and thus restrict America’s ability to compete in terms of spending etc.