I went to Anthropic’s developer conference this week with Business Insider’s new AI reporter, Stephen Council. He’s a terrific writer and a joy to work with, so give him a follow.
The big news: Anthropic is renting AI compute from a giant data center run by SpaceX. So if you use Claude because you think it’s the most ethical AI chatbot, you now have Elon Musk to thank when it runs smoothly and fast.
Hence the edited Claude catchphrase in the photo below. Full disclosure, I used generative AI to change this image to make a newsworthy point and have some fun.
Alistair Barr/Business Insider
The broader takeaway: After subtly criticizing Sam Altman last year for signing too many AI compute deals, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is now copying OpenAI’s playbook.
Why? AI demand is vastly outstripping compute supply. Anthropic has struggled with outages and imposed usage limits in recent months, frustrating developers.
“We’ve had difficulties with compute,” Amodei said on stage. “We’re sorry if sometimes it takes some time, but we’re gonna keep going to acquire as much as we can.”
Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images
Soon after the SpaceX deal was announced, Anthropic relaxed several rate limits, especially around Claude Code, its fast-growing AI coding service. That matters because some developers recently shifted to OpenAI’s Codex partly because OpenAI’s earlier compute deals meant fewer restrictions.
I heard versions of this theme all afternoon at the conference: startups, developers, and tech companies all need more AI capacity.
- One startup CEO told me he recently called a top Google executive to plead for more Gemini tokens, the core unit of AI usage these days.
- I also ran into a Cursor executive who crossed his fingers and looked anxious waiting for the startup’s own SpaceX compute deal to kick in. He said shifting massive data-center capacity between customers is relatively easy because most facilities use similar Nvidia GPUs. Indeed, Anthropic said it will have access to new SpaceX compute within the month.
- A senior Anthropic executive privately admitted the company underestimated demand. When usage surged far faster than expected this year, they scrambled to respond.
It’s an incredible problem to have. If Anthropic’s revenue growth continues at anything close to its current 80x annual pace for another year, the startup would become one of the highest-revenue companies in the world.
Stephen noticed signs of that hypergrowth everywhere at the conference:
“I’ve been covering Big Tech conferences for years. They’re almost always annual, with long-awaited products to peddle. But for Anthropic, the one-year cycle felt almost pointless. It’s growing and shipping absurdly fast. I got one demo from someone who’d been here a few weeks; other workers told me they can barely keep up. Features are flipping from research preview to public beta in no time. If Anthropic can’t teach its developers and customers week-in, week-out, no one will be able to follow along.”
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