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

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

#581

Post by SlinkyOnStairs » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 9:53 AM UTC

fc417fc802 wrote: post #369

stasomatic wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am hobbyist playing around. Recently dropped CC (which gave me a sense of awe 2 months ago), but they realized GPUs need CapEx and I want to screw around with pi.dev on a budget. Then on to GH Copilot but couldn't understand their cost structure, ran out of quota half month in, now on Codex. I don't really see any difference for little stuff. I also have Antigravity through a personal Gmail account with access to O…

> The correction will be brutal, worse than the Industrial Revolution. Has it occurred to you that there might not be a correction, and that the outcome would still be brutal, at least on par with the industrial revolution.

It won't get that far.

It's physically impossible to build out the datacenters required for the "AI is actually good and we have mass layoffs" scenario. This Anthropic investment is spurred on because they've already hit a brick wall with capacity.

$40B goes a long way, but not for datacenters where nearly every single component and service is now backordered. Even if you could build the DC, the power connection won't be there.

The current oil crisis just makes all of that even worse.

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

#582

Post by duskdozer » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 9:54 AM UTC

dieortin wrote: post #300

hmaxwell wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm wondering whether the layoffs are partly targeting people who haven't adapted to using AI tools, particularly those who are openly dismissive of AI-assisted work.

That’s like firing someone because he uses vim instead of VSCode. Who cares about the tools someone uses if he still does his job well?

Because the job changed out from under them - it's now to use AI as much as possible and generate so much and so convoluted content that humans have no chance of keeping up the "velocity" without being entirely dependent on it.

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

#583

Post by brap » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 9:55 AM UTC

singingtoday wrote: post #480

cromka wrote: post #148

Anyone else has an increasing feeling that all the AI hype is turning into a "Dot-Com Bubble x 2008 Credit Default Swaps" collab?

I've got two max 20 plans and totally get value from it.

How does that work? Are you using separate accounts? Do you just max out one of them and then switch to the other one?

We need to run a SotA coding agent basically 24/7 uninterrupted and so far we didn’t find an easy solution for this (you can get provisioned TPUs for Gemini on GCP but it costs a fortune).

Surely that’s possible for under $5k a month? $10k?

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

#584

Post by xnx » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:02 AM UTC

am17an wrote: post #453

barnabee wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I work: - Development velocity is very noticeably much higher across the board. Quality is not obviously worse, but it's LLM assisted, not vibe coding (except for experiments and internal tools). - Things that would have been tactically built with TypeScript are now Rust apps. - Things that would have been small Python scripts are full web apps and dashboards. - Vibe coding (with Claude Desktop, nobody is using…

Sounds exhausting. Are your revenue numbers up?

Reducing costs is also a business benefit.

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

#585

Post by tm-guimaraes » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:04 AM UTC

cavisne wrote: post #493

stingraycharles wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it interesting that Anthropic is in this position and not OpenAI. Where did OpenAI go wrong? Lack of focus and overambitious in some of their spending commitments?

Does not seem that complicated. OpenAI basically had to do a lock-in deal with Microsoft/Azure at the time, and they pioneered this circular funding hyperscaler deal structure so there were some rough edges. Anthropic (all ex Open AI) knew the negatives of the deal, so they made a slightly better deal with AWS, not a full lock in. They also grounded it in hardware from the start, ie. being the flagship customer for T…

Also, the fact that other tech leaders know very well how Sam Altman operates doesn’t help OpenAI secure deals with big tech.

Domain knowledge, expertise, is a big thing in tech, because code can be written fast if you know what to do, and so by having that expertise, building a frontier model is a matter of time and capex. Anthropic is founded by top ex-openAi, so they are not lacking in expertise, and are not attached to SamAlt. It’s an easy choice of who to finance.

Anthropic will win long term because big tech knows how much of a loud mouth sam is, how much of the piee he wants, he is more of a rival then some company they could use to grow. While Anthropic (even though they aren’t really good guys) seems more like a shared common good for the big tech then openAi, like linux corporate business deals version.

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

#586

Post by kakacik » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:06 AM UTC

fc417fc802 wrote: post #538

Aeolun wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> minimize loss of life this time around is (ironically enough) the rise of autonomous weapons systems I think that just means the relative civilian loss of life will increase once again.

What strategic merit is there in targeting civilians or life critical infrastructure in a fully automated battlebot scenario? Perhaps it's naive but I would expect stockpiles, datacenters, and any key infrastructure on which the local semiconductor fabrication depends to be the primary targets.

Look au Ukraine for answers and how russians target almost purely civilian infrastructure and civilians in terror campaigns every single day and night, same as nazis did to Britain in WWII. With exactly same results but they just double down and send more drones next day.

russia is really and empire of the dumb and subjugated serfs at this point (again, history repeats), but they are far from only such place.

Dont expect more, most people are not that nice when SHTF.

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

#587

Post by kakacik » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:09 AM UTC

fnoef wrote: post #579

$40B. Insane. Imagine what could be done with this money to improve humanity. Instead, it’s spent on a fancy text generator that promises to eliminate most of the non mundane and physical jobs, as well as create autonomous killing machines, on top of burning the entire worlds electricity. Crazy.

you can say the same about every recent US war, and add one 0 to the sum.

Or, more controversially, say EU green deal which decimated EU car industry and lost/will lose us few millions of jobs. Losses up to a trillion and nothing to show for that

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

#588

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:10 AM UTC

jdub wrote: post #207

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.

> Security is less or no concern [waits for chickens to come home to roost]

If security was the prime concern, there would be no chickens and no coop and no farm - people would still be living in caves. After all, outside is dangerous, and Grug Chief said, smart ass grugs with their smart ass ideas like fire or agriculture just invite complexity and create security vulnerabilities.

After all (Grug Chief reminds us), the only truly secure computing system is an inert rock.

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

#589

Post by simianwords » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:11 AM UTC

fnoef wrote: post #579

$40B. Insane. Imagine what could be done with this money to improve humanity. Instead, it’s spent on a fancy text generator that promises to eliminate most of the non mundane and physical jobs, as well as create autonomous killing machines, on top of burning the entire worlds electricity. Crazy.

Technology and productivity have reduced more death than any redistribution

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

#590

Post by blippage » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:11 AM UTC

devmor wrote: post #464

jedberg wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first to AGI, or a close approximation, is the winner. That’s what the investors in Anthropic and OpenAI are betting on. I’d be willing the bet that the Venn diagram of investors in those two companies is nearly a circle.

Are these investors high? Or just insane?

Finance professor Aswath Damodaran, and others, have made many useful insights as to how AI as an investment is likely to pay out.

One technique is, instead of trying to pick individual winners, look at the total addressable market. Then compare the market size with the capital being pumped in. If you look on this basis, Aswath concluded that collectively AI investment is likely to provide unsatisfactory returns.

Here's a recent headline: "Nvidia’s Jensen Huang thinks $1 trillion won’t be enough to meet AI demand—and he’s paying engineers in AI tokens worth half their salary to prove it"

There are two parts to this. 1. A staggering $1t is expected to be invested in AI. Someone worked out that this was more than the entire capital expenditure for companies like Apple. We're talking about its entire existence here. IOW, $1t is a lot of dough. A LOT.

Secondly, this whole notion that AI is such a sure thing that half the salary will be in tokens should ring alarm bells. '“I could totally imagine in the future every single engineer in our company will need an annual token budget,” he said. “They’re going to make a few 100,000 a year as their base pay. I’m going to give them probably half of that on top of it as tokens so that they could be amplified 10 times.”'

I recall from the dotcom fiasco that service companies like accountants and lawyers were providing services to the dotcom companies and being compensated in stock options rather than cold hard cash like you'd normally expect.

Very dangerous.

As another poster pointed out, this really boils down to FOMO by big tech. I'm expecting big trouble down the line. We await to see if I'm early or just plain wrong.