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

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

#591

Post by realusername » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:12 AM UTC

barnabee wrote: post #254

an0malous wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Personally at my place, there hasn't been a noticable velocity change since the adoption of Claude Code. I'd say it's even slightly worse as now you have junior frontend engineers making nonsense PRs in the backend.

Mainn blockers are still product, legal, management ... which Claude code didn't help with.

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

#592

Post by dragandj » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:12 AM UTC

nmilo wrote: post #175

throwawaytea wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are countless examples, but let's say Ford. Worth $150 billion, $50 billion not counting debt. My neighbors just gave Ford $60k. It'll be a while until my neighbor gives Anthropic $60k.

Valuations are based on future expected earnings, not revenue. It cost Ford a lot of money to make that $60k car. The margins for AI companies are unknown but the market is pricing that they’ll be higher at one point. Not that they’ll attract more revenue from the average person.

Now let's think about how much money it costs Anthropic to make that $60k. :)

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

#593

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:13 AM UTC

lioeters wrote: post #444

cobolcomesback wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment makes me want to scream.

This is what happens when entire industries go all in on "Move fast and break things." Imagine what they said about software applying to everything else in the world. That's what's coming. > Security is less or no concern, bugs are more acceptable, performance / scalability rarely a concern. Quickest way to get things done

> This is what happens when entire industries go all in on "Move fast and break things." Imagine what they said about software applying to everything else in the world. That's what's coming.

This is literally how rest of the world works already, and always had. We'd still be living in caves otherwise. Fortunately most people (at least outside software) seem to understand that security is a trade-off against usefulness, and not an end goal in itself.

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

#594

Post by souravroy78 » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:15 AM UTC

Are they done with so called state of the art Gemini models

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

#595

Post by croes » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:18 AM UTC

barnabee wrote: post #254

an0malous wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Jevon‘s paradox comes into play.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

In the end only profit matters

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

#596

Post by netcan » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:18 AM UTC

robjeiter wrote: post #556

netcan wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So yes, but that doesn't negate the circular investment aspect, for most intents and purposes. The risk is from this structure is mostly to do with how this affects market cap. Companies using the value of their shares to fund demand for their services. That's a risk.

I feel like the whole market at this point is just AI since big tech other than Apple are all massively invested into that. Everyone owns either the S&P or the total world ETF which are both heavily skewed towards big tech and this trade - so literally everybody is in it. It might go well for a few more quarters/years but once something breaks or gets exponentially cheaper this will take down the whole market with it…

It's just hard to tell the difference between "real" demand and "circular." That's the concern.

PG had an essay about this during the dotcom, when he worked at yahoo. Iirc...Yahoo's share price and other big successes in the space attracted investment into startups. Startups used that money to advertise on yahoo. Yahoo bought some of these the startups.

So... a lot of the revenue used to analyze companies for investment was actually a 2nd order side effect of these investments.

Here the risk is that we have Ai investments servicing Ai investments for other Ai investments.

Google buys Nvidia chips to sell anthropic compute. Anthropic sells coding assist to Ai companies (including Google and Nvidia). They buy anthropic services with investor money that is flowing because of all this hype.

Imo the general risk factor is trying to get ahead of actual worldly use.

The Ai optimists have a sense that Ai produces things that are valuable (like software) at massive scale...that is output.

But... even if true, it will take a lot of time, and lot of software for the Econony to discover this, go through the path dependencies and actually produce value.

The most valuable, known software has already afy been written. The stuff that you could do, but haven't yet is stuff that hasn't made the cut. Value isn't linear.

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

#597

Post by am17an » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:21 AM UTC

xnx wrote: post #584

am17an wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds exhausting. Are your revenue numbers up?

Reducing costs is also a business benefit.

The cost being reduced is the cost of your labour. Tokens are only getting more expensive.

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

#598

Post by netcan » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:26 AM UTC

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #578

netcan wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So yes, but that doesn't negate the circular investment aspect, for most intents and purposes. The risk is from this structure is mostly to do with how this affects market cap. Companies using the value of their shares to fund demand for their services. That's a risk.

>Companies using the value of their shares to fund demand for their services. That's not what's happening here though. Google isn't using the value of its shares to fund demand. Google is using its own cash flow to fund this demand from Anthropic. The question is whether Anthropic has demand from end users for the capacity they are buying from Google (that's a yes I guess) and whether that demand is profitable for An…

True.

Regardless, (a) it's ability/desire to make such investments is still driven by stock-driven optimism and (b) these transactions' "signal" can have a similar, warping effect.

In this case the transaction creates demand for Google's services and also funds anthropic's growth... which represents demands for google's services.

"Loop" is an approximation of an analogy. The risk is that enough of such transactions create a dynamic that distorts feedbacks.

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

#599

Post by notTheLastMan » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:29 AM UTC

stingraycharles wrote: post #440

zmmmmm wrote: post #206

It feels like Anthropic is everybody's insurance policy against someone else winning the AI race. So you have Amazon, Google, Microsoft basically every major tech company pushing their own tech hard but simultaneously ensuring they have a survival level stake in Anthropic if they can't build or acquire their way to stay at frontier level performance themselves.

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?

[dead]

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

#600

Post by notTheLastMan » Sat, Apr 25, 2026, 10:30 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.

[dead]