There is no panic, it's misreporting and bad journalism. 2025 AI budgets were based on 2025 AI capabilities, and let's face it, LLMs only got acceptable in around November 2025. So it's natural usage went up and budgets didn't account for that.

Right but that kinda like just happened. The market hasn't fully reacted to it yet, so it's hard to say that now is the moment when it's safe to draw a linear extrapolation.

As that sort of person myself, albeit not in a software company right now, my thought process would be this.

1) I have a new extra cost 2) How does that make me more profit, and improved cashflow

I know I'll be bombarded with metrics about productivity, feature completion, bug fixes etc. But someone is going to have to tell me how that equates to more sales. And who is going to do that? I'll be worried that the feature wishlist will just creep up now we can handle more throughput, and yet everyone will be telling me that I don't need to worry about the lack of new customers this quarter, one more new feature and we will catch up in Q4. You can see how that could make one grumpy. Then when the sales don't come, I'll tell the CTO that they need to balance the books, if they want to use expensive tools to make each developer more productive then they will need fewer developers...

...but I don't want that, I want more great features that people will pay for, and faster. But they have to pay for themselves.

As Anthropic with all its revenue still needs a large outside capital, it suggests that those AI costs those CFOs pay probably don't cover the actual Anthropic's costs.

You’d be surprised how much vibe is there in VC investing.

When one is under the grip of irrational exuberance and FOMO due diligence goes out the window.

For example look at Sequoia’s investment into FTX and article about Sam that accompanied.

I seriously doubt that anyone is doing much of a due diligence here. They are either counting on others to do it and just follow along OR investing some more money to keep this thing alive enough to go through the IPO.

ARR seems like a interesting concept which hides away the concrete details and is counting on a futuristic possible commitment especially for companies at this early stages. The crucial detail is probably the money being spent, that is what is fueling this sale of equity at this point.

WeWork, Theranos, FTX

They get in now because they want a high IPO exit. They care about the perception of the numbers, not about reality.

If you think investment banks will catch them during the IPO: They have launched many overpriced IPOs in 1999/2000 and also want a high IPO price.

That's basically how 2008 happened

Investors made bad decisions all the time. The proof is in revenue.

I used to think this too. Now I know different.

After cases like Madoff, Theranos, and FTX … I don’t know about that.

Market crashes like the dotcom bust, and countless companies stock rising to high heavens to crash a few months after IPO to shit say otherwise. VALinux was a poster child for investment... lol

Not to mention even a total shitshow from an obvious crackpot like Theranos got $1.2 billion total funding, and a 9B valuation. Or FTX.

There are plenty of examples of investors going off of vibes: Theranos, Juicero, WeWork. Though Anthropic would be a particularly egregious example if it does end up failing.

Investors would never give billions of dollars to liars

more than likely what he meant is their metrics may be non-GAAP.

And the punishment for securities fraud is a slap on the wrist, as Tesla proved with its "going private at $420/share, funding secured" tweet. Who cares about a $40m fine from an increasingly toothless regulator when your investors have already fronted $1.5 billion to settle copyright infringement claims?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y4jpg922qo

> (Also in Axios today is an anonymously sourced note that "An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees" - times that by 12 and you get an extra $6 billion in annualized run-rate!)

This one client, then, is 12.8% of Anthropic's run-rate revenue? That does not exactly fill me with confidence that it's a meaningful number. Doesn't this suggest run-rate revenue will fall off a cliff if Anthropic customers start applying cost controls?

In 2026 what really even is financial crime, other than failing to grease the right palms?

Private companies are not obligated to report GAAP numbers which means they can creatively twist numbers while still be truthful until they go public

You need to think about this more creatively.

What we are talking about is entirely based on this one term in the announcement: run-rate revenue. This is a meaningless term just like how “clinically proven” for vitamins is a way for the companies to use weasel words to imply something without truly being able to back it up, but also not actually lying. There is no legal definition of “clinically proven” so, what exactly would you sue them for? The same thing is true for run-rate revenue. They can cherry pick numbers to use to generate the run-rate revenue value and they are not lying, but this isn’t exactly honest either. We have no transparency and run-rate revenue is not an accounting term.

This goes back to my entire point, this is a vibe. This announcement does not provide much in the way of substance, so a reader will take it to say whatever they want.

Are you familiar with Elon Musk's endless, repeated and obvious lies for the last decade?

> How are they “not obligated to be truthful”? Lying to investors is literally a crime.

In the US?

Hahaha, that was a good one, buddy.