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
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%.
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
Two revelations this week have shaken the narrative in AI : Nvidia’s earnings & this tweet about Gemini.
The AI industry spent 2025 convinced that pre-training scaling laws had hit a wall. Models weren’t improving just from adding more compute during training.
Then Gemini 3 launched. The model has the same parameter count as Gemini 2.5, one trillion parameters, yet achieved massive performance improvements. It’s the first model to break 1500 Elo on LMArena & beat GPT-5.1 on 19 of 20 benchmarks.