Tom Brown

Fable 5 is state-of-the-art on nearly all tested benchmarks, with exceptional performance in software engineering, knowledge work, scientific research, and vision. The longer and more complex the task, the larger Fable 5’s lead over our other models.

In the next few days we'll be ramping up Claude inference on Colossus. Grateful to be partnering with SpaceX here. We are going to need to move a lot of atoms in order to keep up with AI demand, and there's nobody better at quickly moving atoms (on or off planet Earth)

A list of surprising and mind-boggling stats from this conversation: - NDR is over 500% on an annualized basis - Anthropic's first dollar of revenue came in March of 2023 - Over 90% of code inside Anthropic is written by Claude Code - The head of tax is the heaviest token user on the finance team - Run rate revenue went from $9B to $30B in one quarter (reportedly, on pace for $50B by end of next month) - Cowork is growing faster than Claude Code did at the same point in its life - Signed two double-digit million-dollar commits in a 20-minute Uber ride to the podcast - Krishna spends 30-40% of his time on compute decisions - 9 of the Fortune 10 are customers - $100B combined commitment of compute - 30 different product and feature releases in January alone - A prior model found 22 security vulnerabilities in an open source codebase; Mythos found 250 - The finance team has built a library of over 70 Claude skills specific to finance - Anthropic raised $75 billion since Krishna joined two years ago - The day of the Series E first close was the day the DeepSeek news broke - When Meta and others made huge poaching offers, Anthropic lost two people on the technical side while other labs lost dozens - All seven co-founders are still at the company - The company is just over five years old

Krishna Rao is the CFO of Anthropic, and this is his first podcast appearance. He joined the company two years ago when run-rate revenue was about $250M. Today it is $30B. He has helped raise ~$75B and is responsible for the procurement and allocation of compute. I feel lucky we get to hear what it is like to sit inside a company this consequential at a moment this pivotal. We discuss: - The cone of uncertainty - How he allocates compute across Trainium, TPUs, and GPUs - What investors misunderstand about model companies - Why the returns to frontier intelligence keep rising - Platform vs application and where Anthropic builds its own products - How Anthropic uses Claude internally I have asked my closing question about the kindest thing more than 500 times. Krishna's answer is one I have never heard before. Enjoy! Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 2:38 The Compute Canvas 6:51 The "Cone of Uncertainty" 11:58 Why the Returns to Frontier Intelligence Are So High 16:45 Recursive Self-Improvement 20:20 Scaling Laws 23:30 Sourcing $100 Billion in Compute 28:05 Platform vs. Application Strategy 32:52 Pricing Dynamics 38:48 How Anthropic’s Finance Team Uses Claude 43:24 Raising Capital & Overcoming Investor Skepticism 52:32 Public Perception, Risks, and Government Regulation 57:25 Mythos Release 1:12:33 What Could Derail the AI Revolution? 1:13:47 Biotech and Healthcare 1:15:31 The Kindest Thing