Stunning stat: "Anthropic’s investors are expecting the company to reach a valuation of $2tn when it goes public in the coming weeks. Add in SpaceX, which began trading at $2tn after its IPO in June, and OpenAI, which is considering raising money privately at $1.2tn ahead of a public listing next year, and these companies alone could be worth well north of $5tn. Now compare that with the entire history of IPOs from 1980 to 2025. The 3,365 tech companies that went public in that period were worth a combined $4.1tn when they started trading." While I've written much about AI's transformative potential across sectors, I've always been dubious about how much value hyperscalers can seize enabling that transformation. As I dissect in my recent report on "The AI Trade" ( it's not about user acquisition. OpenAI claims to have over one billion active users across its services and two million businesses using its AI models. Anthropic has claimed to have more than 300,000 business customers. The question is not whether they can bring users to their services, but rather how much average revenue they can generate per customer relative to the price of building and maintaining their models. The cost of compute is inflating at the same time competition is depressing token pricing power. That's a precarious dynamic when so much hinges on the success of two companies. To again quote the report: "It’s hard to overstate how much hinges on these IPOs. As mentioned in the Executive Summary, OpenAI and Anthropic will account for 13% of AWS revenue and 27% of Google Cloud revenue this year. As for Microsoft, OpenAI alone accounts for roughly 70% of its AI-specific revenue ($24.1 billion out of an estimated $34 billion total for the fiscal year ending in June 2026). OpenAI has committed to tens of billions of spending on chips from the likes of Nvidia and Broadcom. Deepening circularity concerns, tech giant earnings growth has been increasingly driven by paper gains in the private-market valuations of Anthropic and OpenAI. In Q2, Amazon, Alphabet, Nvidia, Meta, and Microsoft reported $160 billion in cumulative “other income”, trouncing the $69 billion in “other income” reported in Q1. To quote the FT: “These one-off valuation boosts, derived in large part from enthusiasm around AI, risk distorting the financial picture at a time when investors are closely scrutinizing tech earnings.” If either Anthropic or OpenAI stumble in their IPOs, it’ll hit tech giants on multiple balance-sheet fronts and likely ripple through the US and global economy. A pin-prick popping of the AI bubble may not be our base case, but if a pin is out there, it’s likely the revenue versus spending trajectories of Anthropic and OpenAI." FT link:

Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead. You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement. I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible. But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier. Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want. Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well. So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it. If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.

For the past two years, Japan has been in a "Liz Truss" bond market crisis whereby its currency falls even as government bond yields go ever higher. We've never had a major G10 sovereign experience something like this and it's deeply destabilizing...

The US auctioned off 10-year bonds today at the highest yields since 2007. The yield move has been driven by real yields (adjusted for inflation), which are hovering near the highest levels since 2008. The key question: is this alarming or historically normal? (1/3)