Robert Sterling@RobertMSterling
Anthropic’s CEO keeps talking about AI wiping out jobs because he’s trying to IPO this year.
If he positions Claude as armageddon for jobs, his TAM becomes “all white-collar human labor,” not just AI agents or SaaS.
It’s completely self-interested. All the concerns he’s expressing about job disruptions are fake.
It’s a marketing gambit to create hype and FOMO among the people he needs more than anyone else this year: institutional investors like BlackRock, Fidelity, pension funds, and sovereign wealth funds.
If these investors pay for tickets on the hype train—if he can make them believe that AI will eliminate half of white-collar jobs, with Anthropic, as the dominant leader in enterprise AI, positioned to capture the surplus margin—the IPO will be oversubscribed and Anthropic can raise more funds for the company at a higher valuation.
But Dario (or, at least, his bankers) knows that these investors are more fiscally disciplined than they used to be. A lot of them got burned during Covid SPAC-mania and don’t want to risk it again. They’re going to challenge Anthropic about whether it will ever get to sustainably high gross margins, or if its arms race with OpenAI will lead to kilowatt-hours permanently suppressing gross margins. They’re going to ask pointed questions about Anthropic’s massive capex and whether it will ever generate accretive ROIC.
And Dario might not have the answers they’re looking for.
So that’s why—to answer Austen’s smart question—you keep seeing Dario in the news and the podcast circuit, spreading doom and gloom about widespread job loss.
It’s not to make you afraid of losing your job. It’s to get Wall Street afraid of missing out on his IPO.
