Anthropic

The company where Krishna Rao serves as CFO and where compute is the primary operational focus.

“My guest today is Krishna Rao, the CFO of Anthropic. The center of our conversation is how he navigates the decision around procuring and allocating compute, which he describes as the canvas on which everything else gets built. We talk about what he calls the …”

The company where Claude is used internally to automate financial reporting and tax workloads.

“This is really interesting because we were using Claude Code about a year ago and, you know, I started asking people like, "Is everyone just kinda taking up vibe coding or what is it?" And we started to use Claude Code as almost like a assistant, a digital cow…”

The company where Krishna Rao serves as CFO, noted for its unique culture and mission-driven approach.

“The culture is a real unique aspect of Anthropic, and it is something that we do talk about externally, but it's different when you're in there living it. And I can tell you a little bit about some of my observations. First of all, we have seven co-founders. T…”

The company Krishna Rao joined two years ago, which has scaled to a billion dollars in run rate revenue while focusing on frontier models and AI safety.

“So I joined the company about two years ago. We were closing our Series D at the time. That was not a straightforward fundraising. The company really only had a frontier model in the middle of that fundraising. Towards the tail end of it, the FTX transaction w…”

The company Krishna Rao represents, focusing on scaling compute and frontier intelligence.

“I'm always so curious by the metabolism of, in this case, Anthropic for new compute. How fast you could take if I airdropped on you twice the compute that you have tomorrow. Like, would you consume that in-- How fast would you consume that? If I airdrop ten ti…”

The company building the Claude platform and intelligence models.

“The way I would think about it is most of what we're building is platform. We think that there's so many examples of where a platform can accrue a lot of value, but the customers who are building on that platform actually accrue even more value. We think that'…”

The company where Krishna Rao serves as CFO, focusing on efficient compute usage and frontier model development.

“Means a couple of different things. Number one, we use three different chip platforms. So we are customers of Amazon's Trainium chip, Google CPUs, and Nvidia's GPUs. We use these chips fungibly. If you think about the compute we buy, we're using it for model d…”

The company where Krishna Rao serves as CFO, focused on frontier intelligence and enterprise productivity.

“I think it's this idea, and again, it's because we're focused on enterprise and because, you know, we're really trying to change the productivity of knowledge work that's done in the economy. I think it is towards this vision or this goal of, like, a virtual c…”

The company where Krishna Rao serves as CFO, focusing on scaling laws and frontier intelligence.

“We do see progress accelerating. I can't speak for other companies, but for us, the scaling laws are alive and well, and we're seeing that with releases more recently like Mythos. But right now, within the company, ninety plus percent of our code is actually w…”

The company where Krishna Rao serves as CFO, focusing on frontier model development and compute utilization.

“I think it is this paradigm of how compute is used. Thinking of it as not just something that is a variable cost over some time period, but really this resource that's so fungibly utilized. We run workloads on one day in the morning on a chip for inference, an…”

The company Krishna Rao represents, which is scaling its frontier AI models and managing compute resources.

“The company is only a little over five years old. This past March was the third anniversary of the first dollar of revenue into the business, and we only had a frontier model for real for the first time in March of twenty twenty-four. So the timescale of these…”

The company whose mission and principles guide their phased release approach for advanced AI models.

“The release of Mythos was such an interesting moment. It was the first time many people, friends of mine that are careful watchers of this stuff, said something like, "This one kinda makes me scared." So it relates back to the safety question. It's also the fi…”

The company where Krishna Rao serves as CFO, focusing on R&D for model capabilities and compute efficiency.

“connected.These various tasks and workloads that we have internally all fit together in this way of doing R&D to, for model capabilities, for compute efficiency, for serving customers, and then having internal workloads that can be sped up by using the best mo…”

Krishna Rao discusses the company's internal perspective on AI scaling and the future of frontier intelligence.

“We talked a lot about the scale of the compute infrastructure, what models could do in a short amount of time. I think he described a world that I would've said is kind of sci-fi. A lot of what we're experiencing here and now have really roots in that conversa…”

Reported to be in talks for new funding with a massive valuation increase.

“[laughs] All right. I get it. I get it. Uh, well, speaking of [laughs] them getting more money, besides Elon becoming a trillionaire, Anthropic is in talks to raise new funding that would value it at up to $950 billion. Uh-”

The company behind the Mythos model, which is currently being integrated into federal agencies despite ongoing legal disputes with the Pentagon.

“Yes, and nowhere is that schism more apparent than in the Pentagon, Kevin, where on one hand the Pentagon has designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk because it refused to amend its contract to enable any, quote, "lawful use of its technology," as we talke…”

Mentioned as a developer of advanced AI models and the creator of the Mythos model.

“So we can create a temporary scaffolding to let organizations have a little bit more time to go fix their vulnerabilities, but, you know, it has to be done, and the risk, like you rightly articulated, is that open source or nation states or third parties can s…”

The company behind the Mythos model, which faces pressure regarding release safety and international access.

“... is a great agency. Uh, great people over there. And I mean, honestly, like, they, they were just set up to do this exact thing, right? Like, when it was established under President Biden, the idea was these models are getting better. Pretty soon they're go…”

Mentioned as a company working to develop AI responsibly alongside OpenAI.

“Yeah, I, I look at it slightly from a longer term perspective. I think what the Mythos model showed is what the art of the possible is going to be in the future once we are compute unconstrained or we have better models in the future which are trained better. …”

The company behind the Mythos model used in cybersecurity testing.

“I'm a little more perhaps relaxed than what you're trying to ascribe, that people come here tell us it's the worst moment. Historically, what's happened is, in the last seven years, you've seen the time from somebody breaching an organization and being able to…”

The company behind the Claude Mythos Preview model.

“Yes. So we have talked about Claude Mythos Preview, the model that Anthropic, uh, did not release widely but released to a select group of companies and open source maintainers. And today we're actually gonna talk to someone who has used Mythos and who has bee…”

Mentioned as an example of the administration's inconsistent approach to AI companies.

“Uh, this is where it would be helpful to have a coherent strategy, but we don't, right? It's like the same administration that is, like, installing and uninstalling Anthropic at the same time is kind of having a similar level of confusion over in China, where …”

Kevin Roose discloses that his fiance works at this company.

“And my fiance works at Anthropic.”

Praised for taking a stand against the use of multi-layered SPVs in private equity.

“Yeah, absolutely. All right. Listen, uh, I'll, I'll just lightning round this one. Anthropic has had enough of the shenanigans of the multi-tiered, multi-layered SPVs being sold to dentists for 10% load-in fees. I think we all knew this day was coming since it…”

Praised for successfully pivoting to coding agents and influencing industry trends.

“Then you kind of had OpenAI, and they're doing the Sora video thing, and they're also doing ad networks and s- crazy stuff like that. Then you had Gemini, and they had the Nano Banana. And then finally, you've got Anthropic, and they go, "We don't know about t…”

Described as a powerful AI tool that Salesforce is heavily investing in to improve coding and operational efficiency.

“meaning they're inside the CXOs and the C-suite, they have relationships with the CEOs, and they're trusted, and they've been around for 20 years. Those guys I think are positioned to crush. Because eventually, Jason, the next trade that has to happen is when …”

Benioff mentions spending $300 million on their tokens and suggests the need for a routing layer to optimize usage.

“So I'm like coding. Here's my guy. I think I can convince you of this. So here's a, here we're using $300 million of Anthropic this year, and we're coding, we're coding, we're coding, right? The vast majority of those tokens don't need to go to Anthropic. The,…”

Suggested as a potential partner for Apple to white-label AI capabilities.

“So that may end up becoming kind of the way that the world silos out, is like you'll have an i- assistant, but the assistant, for it to be truly useful to you individually, it has to have access to all of your information, whether it's in an enterprise context…”

Mentioned as an AI company that has standardized its operations on Slack.

“And you know that OpenAI and Anthropic and every AI company is standardized on Slack.”

Mentioned as a competitor for software engineering talent.

“In, in all sincerity, what's your strategy and how do you deal with, you know, your internal team? Obviously, they are compensated through, you know, stock, and this is headwind, and you have competition for employees from OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX. So how…”

Cited as an example of a company facing potential government pressure in the United States.

“Sounds like, um, Anthropic in the United States recently, where An- Anthropic, the AI company, refused to give the United States access to its AI under certain conditions and then very quickly, Pete, Pete Hegseth did a, a post, I think, and Donald Trump did a …”

Mentioned as a competitor to OpenAI and a firm that might be adopting a more independent political stance.

“So it's a... So that's one, um, argument against it. The second argument is, and I think Anthropic might have figured this out already, and some of the law firms have figured it out. There's also a gain to be made by saying, "No, I'm independent. We have our o…”

Discussed as an AI company that has become a subject of interest for David Sacks.

“That's correct. And, and by the way, they'll shift on a dime. I don't know if you noticed, suddenly David Sacks is like, "Anthropic's gonna be really successful," after needlessly attacking-”

Mentioned in the context of a deal that signaled the end of Musk's xAI efforts.

“This is the right direction. Yeah. Let me say, he did, he did surrender xAI by doing the Anthropic deal. It just, everybody's left. He's not gonna win here. He could win in this, and I, I, I think he probably might. This is a better focus for him. Speaking of …”

Mentioned as one of the major tech companies pivoting resources toward AI development.

“And then we had the advent of the transformer model, which was underpinning of ChatGPT, and so many of these generative AI and the LLMs, and that enabled ChatGPT to have this breakout moment. And we saw, we have all, actually all lived through this, even if yo…”

Used as an example of a company that investors cannot easily access through a broker.

“And it's not like you can just call up your broker and say, "Hey, I want some shares of Anthropic today," and execute an order. Like, you need to pay for access, and that's what venture capital is doing, and that's what private equity is doing.”

Mentioned as a competitor to OpenAI.

“And in, and in a way it's the thing that, uh, OpenAI is wrestling with at the moment, right? As it competes with Anthropic. Like this question of do you try to be everything?”

Highlighted as a successful research entity in the AI space.

“So, so now I think it's the hardwares, the ro-robotics is obviously, like, massive. I think all the war stuff is massive. I think, you know, crazy AI stuff. So it's just, it's just clear to me that the, the, the ground has shifted again. The ground has moved, …”

Mentioned as an example of a company currently experiencing rapid, rocket-ship growth.

“Yes. The pandemic. Two things happened. Actually, speaking of Jony Ive and Apple and another person named Hiroki here, I spent the 2010s riding a rocket ship. Airbnb, Uber, a few of us, we went on these crazy rocket ships that, like, you know, OpenAI, Anthropi…”

Mentioned as a signatory of a letter warning about the existential risks of AI.

“risks such as pandemics, nuclear war," signed by Bill Gates and Sam Altman and Dario Amodei and many, many others. You didn't sign this letter, and you have been really clear that you are not worried about it. You think a lot of this is alarmism, a lot of the …”