🔮 Exponential View #574: Inside Anthropic’s rocket ship; AI pluralism; love commoditized, context-maxxing & Voltaire++

This post originally appeared in Exponential View.

“As a handful of AI models become the default interface to the world, we risk sliding into an increasingly sycophantic monoculture.”

Hi all,

Suffocated by export controls, Chinese AI labs have developed an efficiency moat that may define the AI market’s development over the coming years. My report from a trip to China.

In this edition:

• Anthropic powers into Main Street as Microsoft and OpenAI consciously uncouple

• Who should really control your AI?

• Voltaire, the Enlightenment entrepreneur

---

The demand

Anthropic’s CFO Krishna Rao gave a fascinating interview on Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s podcast. It’s a cornucopia of insights: for one, the firm’s enterprise customers increased their spending by a factor of five over the past year. That 90% of Anthropic’s code is written by Claude Code is well known, but Krishna says that 90% of finance reporting is now AI-driven as well. Cowork is growing faster than Claude Code (which grew from zero to $1 billion in just six months). Krishna’s been on quite the ride himself – he joined Anthropic two years ago when revenues hit $250 million and now presides over annualized revenues approaching $50 billion – a fivefold increase in as many months. Recommend a listen.

Elsewhere: Anthropic leads OpenAI in business adoption, according to Ramp.