The history of tech is one where “good enough” beats “best in class” nearly every time. Anthropic’s whole business plan is that for reasons they can’t explain this time “best” is what matters.

All indications are the models are increasingly worth less and less and rapidly approaching zero. Even worse, everyone is rapidly shifting to “router” architecture where they switch models constantly. LLMs are perhaps the least sticky product in the history of tech.

The only money to be made is selling compute to run models on. The only real out I see for Anthropic is if somehow compute becomes so constrained that they can flip to sell all their committed compute at a markup to run commodity models. Absent something like that it would appear they don’t have a viable business plan. As many have been pointing out, they casually left Q3 off their charts. Put that back in and suddenly the charts look very worrisome.