Very diplomatic of them to say "we respect that other AI companies might reasonably reach different conclusions" while also taking a dig at OpenAI on their youtube channel
It appears they trend in the right direction:
- Have not kissed the Ring.
- Oppose blocking AI regulation that other's support (e.g. They do not support banning state AI laws [2]).
- Committing to no ads.
- Willing to risk defense department contract over objections to use for lethal operations [1]
The things that are concerning: - Palantir partnership (I'm unclear about what this actually is) [3]
- Have shifted stances as competition increased (e.g. seeking authoritarian investors [4])
It inevitable that they will have to compromise on values as competition increases and I struggle parsing the difference marketing and actually caring about values. If an organization cares about values, it's suboptimal not to highlight that at every point via marketing. The commitment to no ads is obviously good PR but if it comes from a place of values, it's a win-win.
I'm curious, how do others here think about Anthropic?
[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/05/opinion/anthropic-ceo-reg...
[3]https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Anthropic-a...
Obviously it's a play, honing in on privacy/anti-ad concerns, like a Mozilla type angle, but really it's a huge ad buy just to slag off the competitors. Worth the expense just to drive that narrative?
Ads playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf2m23nhTg1OW258b3XBi...
[0]: >>46873708
https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-s-recommendations-o...
Also codex cli, Gemini cli is open source - Claude code will never be - it’s their moat even though 100% written by ai as the creator says it never will be . Their model is you can use ours be it model or Claude code but don’t ever try to replicate it.
You can see the very different response by OpenAI: https://openai.com/index/our-approach-to-advertising-and-exp.... ChatGPT is saying they will mark ads as ads and keep answers "independent," but that is not measurable. So we'll see.
For Anthropic to be proactive in saying they will not pursue ad based revenue I think is not just "one of the good guys" but that they may be stabilizing on a business model of both seat and usage based subscriptions.
Either way, both companies are hemorrhaging money.
https://x.com/ns123abc/status/2019074628191142065
In any case, they draw undue attention to openAI rather than themselves. Not good advertising
Both openAI and Anthropic should start selling compute devices instead. There is nothing stoping open-source LLMs from eating their lunch mid-term
https://www.wheresyoured.at/why-everybody-is-losing-money-on... https://www.economist.com/business/2025/12/29/openai-faces-a... https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openais-own-forecast-predicts...
https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/can-ai-companies-become-pr...
Their AWS spend being higher than their revenue might hint at the same.
Nobody has reliable data, I think it's fair to assume that even Anthropic is doing voodoo math to sleep at night.
To be fair, they also cooperate with the US government for immoral dragnet surveillance[0], and regularly assent to censorship (VPN bans, removed emojis, etc.) abroad. It's in both Apple and most governments' best interests to appear like mortal enemies, but cooperate for financial and domestic security purposes. Which for all intents and purposes, it seems they do. Two weeks after the San Bernardino kerfuffle, the iPhone in question was cracked and both parties got to walk away conveniently vindicated of suspicion. I don't think this is a moral failing of anyone, it's just the obvious incentives of Apple's relationship with their domestic fed. Nobody holds Apple's morality accountable, and I bet they're quite grateful for that.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
Google changed all that, and put a clear wall between organic results and ads. They consciously structured the company like a newspaper, to prevent the information side from being polluted and distorted by the money-making side.
Here's a snip from their IPO letter [0]:
Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating. We also display advertising, which we work hard to make relevant, and we label it clearly. This is similar to a well-run newspaper, where the advertisements are clear and the articles are not influenced by the advertisers’ payments. We believe it is important for everyone to have access to the best information and research, not only to the information people pay for you to see.
Anthropic's statement reads the same way, and it's refreshing to see them prioritize long-term values like trust over short-term monetization.
It's hard to put a dollar value on trust, but even when they fall short of their ideals, it's still a big differentiator from competitors like Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI.
I'd bet that a large portion of Google's enterprise value today can be traced to that trust differential with their competitors, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a similar outcome for Anthropic.
Don't be evil, but unironically.
[0] https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-letter/default...
Are you sure? Both Gemini and ChatGPT gave me consistent answers 3 times in a row, even if the two versions are slightly different.
Their answers are inline with this version:
> What I think is clear is they have to build an advertising product, and the reason they have to build an advertising product is any consumer Internet product has to be advertising, because it’s such a beneficial model to everyone involved, and the reason it’s so beneficial is you get to indefinitely and infinitely increase average revenue per user without any worries about price elasticity, because the entire increase in average revenue per user is borne by the advertisers who are paying it willingly because they’re getting a positive return on their investment, and everyone’s using it for free so you can reach the whole world. Then what happens with that is once you get that model going, you have a massive R&D advantage, because you have so much more money coming in than anyone who doesn’t have that cycle or who has to charge users for it.
https://stratechery.com/2026/ads-in-chatgpt-why-openai-needs...
> This point, more than anything else, explains why the company so desperately needs an advertising model. Advertising is the only potential business model that can meaningfully bend the revenue curve such that the company can not just fund its compute but gain leverage on it, for all of the reasons I laid out before: first, advertising increases the breadth of the business, in that you can offer a better product to more people, increasing usage and expanding inventory. Second, advertising increases the depth of the business, in that there is infinite upside in terms of average revenue per user: more usage means more inventory on one hand, and building out the capability for effective targeting and high conversion rates increases the amount that advertisers are willing to pay — even as the cost to the user remains the same (ideally free).
It's valuable to remember that advertisers will pay more per user than users will, and that's hard to beat in a competitive market.
The first imperative is a company must survive past its employees. A company is an explicit legal structure designed to survive past the initial people in the company. A company is _not_ the employees, it is what survives past the employees' employment.
The second imperative is the diffusion of responsibility. A company becomes the responsible party for actions taken, not individual employees. This is part of the reason we allow companies to survive past employees, because their obligations survive as well.
This leads to individual employees taking actions for the company against their own moral code for the good of the company.
See also The Corporation (2003 film) and Meditations On Moloch (2014)[0].
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
1) Yes, they are absolutely useless in a consumer setting. 2) If you want to be a software developer, you absolutely need to know how to understand/interact with one, and you more than likely will need to understand things like https://continue.dev.
I am no longer in software development due to my body slowly (quickly) dying, however I see it all from the sidelines:
1) New tech was rushed to the front lines way too quickly by big tech. 2) Big (and small tech) rushed layoffs way too fast rather than let we devs explore the advantages vs. disadvantages. 3) Companies blame "AI" (LLMs) for layoffs. 4) Most senior devs (including myself) soundly reject AI due to the above. 5) New generation of devs uses AI tools, some struggle occurs where morons don't bother reviewing code that was written by an auto completion engine. 6) We nerds begin to understand the usefulness of LLMs for "the boring part"
Not a shareholder of any company. I'm permanently disabled. Just watching this stuff from the sidelines.
[0] https://openai.com/index/our-approach-to-advertising-and-exp...
0. https://www.npr.org/2020/01/22/796801746/max-richter-tiny-de...
Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude. Recent advertising campaigns from Anthropic.
Violation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQRu7DdTTVA
Betrayal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBSam25u8O4