As I noted before in the world of software best has seldom dominated the market but market capture has been successful. A speculative model where Anthropic is a $6T company seems possible using what, as a scientist not an economist, seem reasonable extreme limits. In back of the envelope numbers for the US we have a $3e13 economy with Microsoft the closest to a pure software fee for service company making $1e11 in 2025 (while Oracle a technically more vital company is ca. $2e10) so let the total software tax be 6x Microsoft (to make it easy in my head as I cognitively decline) or 2% of the economy (to the extent dollars measure the real economy, which they don't thermodynamically) all collected by a single player, Anthropic. A company with $6e11 in profits would be $6e12 at 10x PE a reasonable number. Is there any trajectory where a single software company could capture 2% of the economy in profit? Again to make the math simple let there be 1.5e8 households in the US or $4e3 Anthropic profit/household. I'm not an economist or a historian but that mental math and a vague recollection of 1793 France lead me to be skeptical.
A potential secret sauce for market capture is, as I noted earlier, being the sole supplier of required infrastructure. It is reasonable to speculate that many of the gains from AI agents will occur through interaction with other agents. Think of the hope for CORBA decades ago but now a proprietary interface. Again, 1793 France makes me skeptical.
Back in the day, you needed Windows and Office apps to communicate with your fellow workers, and you need Intel chips in order to make the IBM-compatible PC on which Windows and Office ran actually work. Ben Thompson's aggregator theory is, I think, the best outline we have of how this works. I do not see how it could work in the case of "AI". Yes, Anthropic appears to have Secret Harness Sauce for now, but I read its desperation to IPO as a sign that it believes this too is going to be a very temporary and evanescent lead, and that IPO-now is the best way to try to stabilize their finances:
> **John Daschbach**: As I noted before in the world of software best has seldom dominated the market but market capture has been successful. A speculative model where Anthropic is a $6T company seems possible using what, as a scientist not an economist, seem reasonable extreme limits. In back of the envelope numbers for the US we have a $3e13 economy with Microsoft the closest to a pure software fee for service company making $1e11 in 2025 (while Oracle a technically more vital company is ca. $2e10) so let the total software tax be 6x Microsoft (to make it easy in my head as I cognitively decline) or 2% of the economy (to the extent dollars measure the real economy, which they don't thermodynamically) all collected by a single player, Anthropic. A company with $6e11 in profits would be $6e12 at 10x PE a reasonable number. Is there any trajectory where a single software company could capture 2% of the economy in profit? Again to make the math simple let there be 1.5e8 households in the US or $4e3 Anthropic profit/household. I'm not an economist or a historian but that mental math and a vague recollection of 1793 France lead me to be skeptical.
> A potential secret sauce for market capture is, as I noted earlier, being the sole supplier of required infrastructure. It is reasonable to speculate that many of the gains from AI agents will occur through interaction with other agents. Think of the hope for CORBA decades ago but now a proprietary interface. Again, 1793 France makes me skeptical.
As I noted before in the world of software best has seldom dominated the market but market capture has been successful. A speculative model where Anthropic is a $6T company seems possible using what, as a scientist not an economist, seem reasonable extreme limits. In back of the envelope numbers for the US we have a $3e13 economy with Microsoft the closest to a pure software fee for service company making $1e11 in 2025 (while Oracle a technically more vital company is ca. $2e10) so let the total software tax be 6x Microsoft (to make it easy in my head as I cognitively decline) or 2% of the economy (to the extent dollars measure the real economy, which they don't thermodynamically) all collected by a single player, Anthropic. A company with $6e11 in profits would be $6e12 at 10x PE a reasonable number. Is there any trajectory where a single software company could capture 2% of the economy in profit? Again to make the math simple let there be 1.5e8 households in the US or $4e3 Anthropic profit/household. I'm not an economist or a historian but that mental math and a vague recollection of 1793 France lead me to be skeptical.
A potential secret sauce for market capture is, as I noted earlier, being the sole supplier of required infrastructure. It is reasonable to speculate that many of the gains from AI agents will occur through interaction with other agents. Think of the hope for CORBA decades ago but now a proprietary interface. Again, 1793 France makes me skeptical.
Back in the day, you needed Windows and Office apps to communicate with your fellow workers, and you need Intel chips in order to make the IBM-compatible PC on which Windows and Office ran actually work. Ben Thompson's aggregator theory is, I think, the best outline we have of how this works. I do not see how it could work in the case of "AI". Yes, Anthropic appears to have Secret Harness Sauce for now, but I read its desperation to IPO as a sign that it believes this too is going to be a very temporary and evanescent lead, and that IPO-now is the best way to try to stabilize their finances:
> **John Daschbach**: As I noted before in the world of software best has seldom dominated the market but market capture has been successful. A speculative model where Anthropic is a $6T company seems possible using what, as a scientist not an economist, seem reasonable extreme limits. In back of the envelope numbers for the US we have a $3e13 economy with Microsoft the closest to a pure software fee for service company making $1e11 in 2025 (while Oracle a technically more vital company is ca. $2e10) so let the total software tax be 6x Microsoft (to make it easy in my head as I cognitively decline) or 2% of the economy (to the extent dollars measure the real economy, which they don't thermodynamically) all collected by a single player, Anthropic. A company with $6e11 in profits would be $6e12 at 10x PE a reasonable number. Is there any trajectory where a single software company could capture 2% of the economy in profit? Again to make the math simple let there be 1.5e8 households in the US or $4e3 Anthropic profit/household. I'm not an economist or a historian but that mental math and a vague recollection of 1793 France lead me to be skeptical.
> A potential secret sauce for market capture is, as I noted earlier, being the sole supplier of required infrastructure. It is reasonable to speculate that many of the gains from AI agents will occur through interaction with other agents. Think of the hope for CORBA decades ago but now a proprietary interface. Again, 1793 France makes me skeptical.