Anthropic does surge pricing
With software engineers suddenly using thousands of times more tokens for agentic coding, Anthropic is having capacity problems, with outages increasing, users complaining of suddenly limited responses, OpenClaw being cut off, and a succession of price increases. It was always clear that some of the pricing plans were cheaper than the real cost of heavy users, and Anthropic has invested least in capacity of all of the big labs (partly reflecting the lack of a consumer story), but now, with agentic coding finding massive product-market fit, that’s become a real problem. There are lots of long-term discussions about where this will end up, with the extreme case arguing that token budgets will rise to match headcount budgets, which is all like trying to forecast internet use in the late 1990s, but it seems to me that a good comparison is mobile data in the late 2000s, when the iPhone’s flat rate data swamped AT&T’s network. The natural end-state of all these situations is a segmented range of flat rate bundles. LINK
Allbird AI
Meanwhile, after announcing last week that it would sell the remains of the once-buzzy shoe business for pennies, this week Allbirds (effectively just a cash shell) announced that it would now do something vague in AI data centres, and the stock went up 5x. That’s the kind of thing that happens in bubbles, but it also reflects a basic shortage of ways for public markets investors to get a clean investment in AI. You can short existing software companies, and buy Nvidia (and to some extent TSMC and ASML) and random Japanese speciality ceramics companies, but what else? LINK
Meta Manus
China’s reaction to Meta’s acquisition of Manus (agentic AI platform) seems to be escalating: the FT reports that it looks like orders came from the very top to crack down, with multiple ministries ordered to take an interest. Moving your co-founders to Singapore to get around Chinese limits on foreign acquisitions might not have been as clever as it seemed, especially in such a strategic sector. Hence, China is only investable if you can get a domestic exit? Would that matter for Beijing - is there a shortage of capital for AI? LINK
The week in AI
OpenAI continues to build out its adtech stack. LINK
Google has joined Anthropic and OpenAI with a desktop Mac app. The shift from the web to local apps is partly driven by practical go-to-market considerations (get your own icon on the dock), but rather more by the scope to interact with local apps and files - using the operating systems as an actual operating system, not just a place to run browser tabs. Meanwhile, it’s also notable there is a Mac app but no Windows app. LINK
The US plans to require data centres to report their energy use. LINK
Back in January, when Elon Musk tried to juice demand for Grok by letting it produce deepfake porn, Apple was concerned enough to threaten to pull the app from the App Store if Grok didn’t add more safeguards. LINK
The Information reports that Apple has sent several hundred developers on the Siri team on a ‘bootcamp’ to learn how to code with AI. I would have guessed that if anyone at Apple considered it an essential part of their job to know everything about this stuff already, it would be the Siri team, but apparently not. LINK
Uber goes back to robots
Uber got out of robots back in 2018, realising that while ML got us 90% of the way, the next 10% was 50% of the work, and meanwhile Uber was spending both too much money and not enough (also, remember the Levandowski lawsuit). But now physical AI is hot again, Waymo is kind of working, and Uber is back: the FT calculates that it’s committed $10bn over the next few years towards vehicle purchases and equity stakes across more than a dozen different tech companies (it had almost $10bn of FCF last year). That’s a portfolio model, rather than the previous attempt to build the whole thing itself. LINK
Amazon buys Globalstar
As rumoured a couple of weeks ago, Amazon has bought the LEO satellite operator Globalstar to bulk up its satellite Internet project. Apple (which has a stake in) remains an anchor customer for the emergency connectivity in iPhones. LINK
Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket company had a semi-successful launch. LINK
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