Anthropic pre-IPO gamesmanship post. Pure speculation but sharing as curious for thoughts. Anthropic shifted from gross to net ARR accounting and stripped out both Meta and Chinese distillation from their $65 billion ARR number. Meta speculated to be over $5 billion in ARR so taking them out means they can easily weather it when Meta turns them off shortly after being public, which is widely expected. Also decreases the odds of Meta turning them off, watermelon quality dependent. All smart. Then release Fable 5.1 so OpenAI feels confident releasing Astra. Vibes here on Astra are really good btw. I think that Astra was probably better than Anthropic was expecting. Now there are whispers that Anthropic has solved Navier-Stokes, which would be super impressive. Anthropic probably releases Fable 5.2, which should be better than Astra unless something is awry, sometime before the IPO. Likely also planning on showing a significant reacceleration in ARR in September which will of course leak to the press. Grok 4.7, Meta’s Watermelon and ChatGPT 6.1 all likely coming in the next 6 weeks as well. All those labs are confident about their roadmaps in a way I have not seen in the last 18 months. And we will see about Gemini 4. Competitors get a vote in all these plans. Grok Bot feels like the best agentic harness yet for enterprise use cases and Instinct is a promising agentic harness for consumer use cases. Should see variations of both from competitors soon. Grok Bot remains transformational for my use cases. And all this is happening into a continued acceleration in overall AI demand. Wild times. As an aside, I think Krishna might turn out to be an exceptional CFO. His former Blackstone colleagues speak super highly of him. Going to be important as communicating clearly to Wall Street if they decide to shift their compute from inference to training will be difficult to digest the first time. Probably worth studying Amazon’s invest and then “check-in” margin strategy from 2010 through maybe 2016, which investors eventually understood.