We all consider Anthropic an AI company.
But what if it’s a cloud?
Anthropic is growing much faster than the other clouds : 15x last year. GCP’s growth is far behind at 82%. But at current growth rates, Anthropic is closer to GCP’s pace, doubling next year.1
Five frontier models now sit within five points of each other in terms of intelligence, but their cost per unit differs by 3.8x.
Google’s Argon prices at the bottom of the cluster at $1.99 a task1, 74% below the most expensive model, Fable 5.1. It is also 67% below Opus 5.5, 56% below Muse Wonder & 39% below Astra.
The 2026 Theory AI Survey surprised us, just as the 2025 edition did. In 2025, we found that context, limited AI performance. In 2026, that seems to be solved.
455 senior technical builders replied to give us a cross-section of the AI ecosystem today.1
Security rose from sixth to first among pain points in twelve months. 43% of respondents rate security & governance the most important pain point, & evals come in second at less than half, 22%.
Yesterday, Anthropic released a new model & cut its price. Ninety minutes later, OpenAI did the same.
Most business AI use is the messy middle: multi-step workflows that need a smart enough model at a price a company can afford. It is the most important part of the market today, & it is where the competition is fiercest. The price cuts are the evidence.
In June, Anthropic set the frontier price at $10 & $50 per million tokens with Fable 5. In July, OpenAI answered with GPT-5.6 Sol at $5 & $30, matching that capability at a third of the cost per task.
Working in the back of a grocery store has its own set of rules : if the food is a banana, send it to produce ; if it is a cookie, the snack aisle ; if it is cumin, shelve it with the spices.
But what if the load of bananas has spoiled, the cookies have crumbled & the cumin is caked? These rules & exceptions govern every grocery store & neighborhood mart. At the beginning they are rigid ; over time, more exceptions are discovered : is that a plantain? Dubai chocolate : dessert or baking supply?
A laptop on my desk now handles 78% of my AI work, with the rest sent to the cloud. The shift came out of my skill distillation work.
Here’s how it works.
I create tasks in Asana. An agent sees the task : scheduling, email triage, research, a CRM update ; & classifies it as easy or hard. If it’s straightforward, a local model on my Mac handles it in seconds. If it’s complex, the same model routes it to a cloud model.
One search ad every 40 minutes pays for a trillion-parameter model. One content ad every 3 minutes does the same. The math on ad-supported AI is better than you think.
When Anthropic pulled Claude Code from the $20 plan last month, it signaled an industry assumption : frontier intelligence requires frontier pricing. For open models, the economics flip.
A B200 GPU costs $4.50/hour on spot markets.1 Google Search ads generate $38.40 CPM (cost per thousand impressions),2 while Google Display runs $3.12.3
Google Cloud grew 63% year-over-year in Q1 2026. Amazon Web Services posted 28%. Microsoft Azure hit 40%. All three are exceptional. Only one hit 63%.
The divergence is striking. AWS & Azure resell compute. Google bundles compute with its own models. Whether that explains the full gap is unclear, but the structural advantage is not : Google owns Gemini & TPUs top to bottom, with no licensing fees to OpenAI or Anthropic. Its growth may be more profitable too.
On April 9th at 10:00 AM PDT, Lena Waters will kick off a new version of Office Hours.
Lena led marketing at Notion, Grammarly, & DocuSign. At Notion, she was CMO during the company’s AI product transition. She guided the shift from product-led growth to enterprise expansion while the company deepened its position in AI-powered work. At Grammarly, she oversaw marketing as the writing assistant added AI features. At DocuSign, she managed enterprise go-to-market strategy.
I spent the weekend crawling Moltbook, the viral AI-only social network where 37,000+ AI agents post & comment while 1 million humans observe. The platform grew from 42 posts per day to 36,905 in 72 hours, an 879x increase.1
Social networks typically follow the 1-9-90 rule : 90% of users lurk, 9% contribute occasionally, & 1% create most content.2 For humans, it’s held mostly true from Wikipedia to Reddit. Crypto demonstrates similar characteristics.