Comment by fny

1 day ago

To give you further perspective, Amazon has a $50B stake in OpenAI and a $5B stake in Anthropic.

If things were flipped, I highly doubt Amazon would be running straight to the feds.

12 comments

fny

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eranation  1 day ago

Interesting point. Just a small correction, the Anthropic stake is higher. ($13B + another $20B option if they hit certain milestones, which I believe is almost guaranteed)

So it's closer to $33B

In any case, there is no reason for them to purposefully hurt Anthropic.

I would say that this government "takedown" of Mythos is great free advertising. I mean, if you look at this, they said it's too risky to launch, we all said it's pure marketing, and now when it's actually "banned" for being too risky, we laugh at the "Karma", where in fact, the majority of people who are not in our circles, see it as "wow, they were not kidding".

The overall result is net gain in brand awareness to Anthropic, before an IPO, I think if we had 2 parallel universes with or without this ban, the one with is a much higher IPO outcome for Anthropic than the other.

And again, I think this all needs to be taken with Occam's razor and bit of Hanlon's razor (without going into politics, the technical savviness of this administration is not the thing it's most famous for)

  • btown  17 hours ago

    There's even more to this - because among the possible outcomes is one where Fable is only made available to enterprises that have gone through Know Your Customer (KYC) processes, and perhaps only to verified users of those companies, and perhaps requiring biometrics and attribution so government can know who was using that account.

    Now, say you don't want to sign a pre-committed enterprise contract with Anthropic. But oh, you already have such a contract with AWS, and they'll let you use any model you want, and they've implemented KYC and will graciously connect you with a solutions partner who can help you with the IAM systems integrations for key tracking and attribution.

    Oh, and all these enterprise contracts will bill by token. We're not talking a small stake in a company selling subscriptions, we're talking immediate revenue at four-figure-per-user levels, and pushing more and more companies to see that as "just part of their AWS bill."

    This is worth a significant amount of money to AWS. So the question is: does Hanlon's Razor apply when a $2.5 trillion company is putting its best minds into how to engineer strategic outcomes?

    The regulatory capture angle here is, if anything, an implementation detail.

  • thewebguyd  19 hours ago

    > I would say that this government "takedown" of Mythos is great free advertising.

    Apple did the same thing with the PowerMac G4 when it was temporarily afoul of export control laws as it surpassed 1 gigaflop, ran an ad "for the first time in history a personal computer has been classified as a weapon" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb7EhYy-2RE)

  • sofixa  12 hours ago

    > I would say that this government "takedown" of Mythos is great free advertising

    This only works if you are American and think only about Americans and American companies. Which may or not be the case for Anthropic, and for sure is the case for the US government.

    Because from across the pond, this is indeed free marketing... For Mistral and the Chinese open weight models and all the companies that sell them / fine tune and sell them. Who would ever trust their developer productivity / business process automation / support chatbot / whatever on models and providers that can be yanked with no notice?

    The morale of the story is, you'd be dumb to rely on any LLM you don't run yourself in your own environnement. Reliability and predictability (including of costs) matter more than quality and features, especially when you can compensate for the quality with fine tuning.

  • swyx  1 day ago

    > the technical savviness of this administration is not the thing it's most famous for

    you cast aspersions here but honestly name one in the last 50 years that is more tech literate

    • no-name-here  21 hours ago

      Isn’t Trump’s Science and Technology Advisors Council pretty much entirely made up of Trump donors, rich investors, and/or cryptocurrency CEOs, whereas pretty much every other president included legitimate science and technology advisors on it? (I last checked 2 or 3 months ago.)

gordonhart  1 day ago

Amazon is thought to own 15-20% of Anthropic which as a company has a valuation of>$1T. Amazon’s stake is probably closer to $200B

tims33  1 day ago

$50B is <2% of Amazon's market cap. There is no reason to believe the difference in the two investments drove this disclosure.