Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic • Hacker News Board

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#541

Post by _zoltan_ » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 7:29 AM UTC

an0malous wrote: post #153

tiffanyh wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s what’s needed when you go from $9B in ARR … to $30B in ARR literally just one quarter later . That kind of insane growth & demand is unprecedented at that scale. https://www.anthropic.com/news/google-broadcom-partnership-c...

What is all this AI doing? People are spending 10’s to 100’s of billions and no service or technology seems better or cheaper. Everything is more expensive and worse.

Claude is great. I'm never going back. There is no way back.

I'm at least 5x faster, if not more. With tooling I might be able to get to 10-15x.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#542

Post by aurareturn » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 7:30 AM UTC

stephc_int13 wrote: post #78

My opinion about this is that Google see it as a way to weaken OpenAI, and few other side benefits, including the option to acquire Anthropic. And it may very well be bad news for OpenAI.

  including the option to acquire Anthropic.

Not possible anymore unless Anthropic collapses and goes on a multi-year decline.

They're worth $1 trillion in private market. If they IPO today, I'm willing to bet my house that the hype will drive them to $2 trillion market cap or 50% of Google's marketcap.

OpenAI and Anthropic will be the biggest IPOs ever - bigger than SpaceX. That's my prediction.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#543

Post by _zoltan_ » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 7:30 AM UTC

msy wrote: post #185

Jagerbizzle wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm burning an insane number of tokens 8-12 hours a day for the dramatic improvement of some internal tooling at a big tech company. Using it heavily for an unannounced future project as well. I presume I'm not the only one.

We suddenly have a proliferation of new internal tools and resources, nearly all of which are barely functional and largely useless with no discernible impact on the overall business trajectory but sure do seem to help come promo time. Barely an hour goes by without a new 4-page document about something that that everyone is apparently ment to read, digest and respond to, despite its 'author' having done none of thos…

That's not on Claude, that's on the authors.

Claude is a tool. It can be abused, or used in a sloppy way. But it can also be used rigorously.

I've been beating my team to be more papercut-free in the tooling they develop and it's been rough mostly because of the velocity.

But overall it's a huge net positive.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#544

Post by throwaway2037 » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 7:31 AM UTC

bonesss wrote: post #492

skybrian wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, since Google is both a supplier and a competitor, it’s both vendor finance and hedging. Also, it increases their investment in AI, in general. Arguably, too much of this kind of hedging is anti-competitive. But that doesn’t seem to be much of a problem yet?

Are we stoping too early in this analysis though? Google versus OpenAI and Anthropic, sure, but Microsoft is deep into OpenAI. Google helping Anthropic is also putting MS into a corner (one that may even be shrinking? Copilot and openAI financing hurting their brand, rumours of deep displeasure at OpenAIs promises v returns). Seen from afar I see Google happy to provide TPUs for money (improving Googles strategic pos…

You make some good points, but this part feels like a wild overreach:

    > torpedoing confidence in LLMs with their search AI summaries

That is some real tin foil hat thinking.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#545

Post by _zoltan_ » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 7:32 AM UTC

cobolcomesback wrote: post #308

BloondAndDoom wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is truly perfect for internal tooling. Security is less or no concern, bugs are more acceptable, performance / scalability rarely a concern. Quickest way to get things done, and speed up production development, MVP development etc.

This comment makes me want to scream.

This is not going away.

Even right now the difference with working with 'AI native' developers or with regular developers is day and night.

I certainly wouldn't want a non-clause enabled developer on my team now.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#546

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 7:34 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #520

zarzavat wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine such an AI exists. What good is AI that is so good that you cannot sell API access because it would help others to build equivalently powerful AI and compete with you? If you gatekeep, you will not make back the money you invested. If you don't gatekeep, your competitors will use your model to build competing models. I guess you can sell it to the Department of War.

> What good is AI that is so good that you cannot sell API access because it would help others to build equivalently powerful AI and compete with you? Its awesome and world dominating, you just don’t sell access to that AI, you instead directly, by yourself, dominate any field that better AI provides a competitive advantage in as soon as you can afford to invest the capital to otherwise operate in that field, and you…

Yup. That doesn't really take a full-blown AGI on the path to ASI on the path to godhood - it'll take a bit better and more reliable LLM with a decent harness.

That's why I've been saying that the entire software industry is now living on borrowed time. It'll continue at the mercy of SOTA LLM operators, for as long as they prefer to extract rent from everyone for access to "cognition as a service". In the meantime, as the models (and harnesses) get better, the number of fields SOTA model owners could dominate overnight, continues to grow.

(One possible trigger would be the open models. As long as the gap between SOTA and open is constant or decreasing, there will be a point where SOTA operators might be forced to cannibalize the software industry by a third party with an open model and access to infra pulling the trigger first.)

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#547

Post by fc417fc802 » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 7:36 AM UTC

darkwater wrote: post #531

fc417fc802 wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If humans are able to judge, and if the AI is more capable than a human in every respect, then why can't the AI be the judge of its own performance? Humans judge their own output all the time.

The difference IMO is that every single human is a slightly different model, not the same one with a different prompt, or weights.

I'm not sure I buy that competition between individuals is a hard requirement but lets assume that to be the case for now. Then how many variants of itself do you suppose an AI could instantiate in parallel given full control of a gigawatt class datacenter?

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#548

Post by simianwords » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 7:38 AM UTC

omrajguru wrote: post #516

Google investing in its own customer, Anthropic buying Google's compute. the money doesn't really leave the room.

This sounds like a conspiracy theory if you don’t know how basic finance and economics work

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#549

Post by AnggaSP » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 7:38 AM UTC

billisonline wrote: post #57

lanthissa wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

googles multiple businesses and gemini isn't the largest one. anthropic is the anchor external customer of tpu's and nvidia is worth more than all of google. If tpu's actually breakout as a viable alternative over the next few years for multiple clients the business could easily be worth as much as search, maybe more.

> If tpu's actually breakout as a viable alternative over the next few years Why haven't they broken out yet, I wonder, if they're more efficient for inference and LLM costs are now weighted towards inference over training?

TPUs are not that portable and easy for both inferencing and training. It has since improved a lot with their effort on the torch backend (XLA/TorchTPU) and JAX though.

But as far as i know it currently supports just that + tensorflow (which nobody uses it anymore, least here). And last we tried, so much of our kernels needs rework that it’s not worth the effort.

This may change since ironwood but we haven’t tried that generation.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#550

Post by fc417fc802 » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 7:40 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #540

fc417fc802 wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If humans are able to judge, and if the AI is more capable than a human in every respect, then why can't the AI be the judge of its own performance? Humans judge their own output all the time.

Humans ultimately judge their output by comparison and competition. When we get to the point an AI is capable of participating on the market directly, it'll no longer make sense to proxy judgement through humans anymore.

Agreed. But also, comparison and competition between individuals is only one of the ways in which improvement happens. Consider for example that it's also possible to build something for personal consumption and iteratively improve on the design without regard for what anyone else thinks of it. Cooking comes to mind.