Meta & Microsoft's Claude Slowdown, His Agent Leaked His Banking Info, Don’t Bully Your AI

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Meta and Microsoft pull back their Claude plans 2) Are standard models like Muse Spark good enough? 3) Is Anthropic in trouble if its top clients cut back significantly? 4) Downloads have slowed for Claude Code ahead of Anthropic IPO 5) Elon says Grok Bot will use all models, including Anthropic's 6) Is Elon in the Harness Hive (yes) 7) Muse books the wrong doctor 8) Grok Bot leaks Shane Mac's banking details 9) Anthropic bans users who persistently bully Claude 10) Google releases Gemini.... --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack + Discord? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Microsoft and Meta back away from Claude. Does it spell some trouble for Anthropic ahead of its IPO? Will your AI agent share your banking data in a group chat? And finally, don't be mean to your AI. You might end up getting banned from the service. That's coming up on a Big Technology Podcast Friday edition right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis Chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, Head of Enterprise Business Solutions at Voya Financial,

• 0:43Speaker 00

  to go inside a large-scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation.

• 1:22Speaker 00

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, where we break down the news in our traditional, cool-headed and nuanced format. We have a great show for you today. There's new reporting that shows Meta and Microsoft might be backing away from spending on Claude just as Anthropic gets ready for its IPO. Your personal agent might be very useful, but it might share your banking data in a group chat. We'll talk about what happened and why you should or shouldn't be concerned. And then finally, Anthropic has a new policy that if you're persistently mean to Claude, it might ban you from the service. So we'll talk about whether you should be mean to your AI or not, and what the consequences might be. Joining us as always on Friday is Ron John Roy of Margins. Ron John, welcome. Good to see you.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Good to see you. Don't be mean to your AI. Don't bully Claude.

• 2:05Speaker 00

  Are you mean to your AI? Do you ever bully? Because sometimes people say if you're a little bit mean, you get better results.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  I think I bully Copilot, just because I think Copilot likes to be bullied. Copilot likes to be bullied, but maybe Claude's a little more sensitive.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  We're starting right there.

• 2:25Speaker 00

  Oh, we're starting fast. All right. We'll get to that in a bit, but we should really talk about the main story this week. And look, it's not a crazy headline, but I think it says a lot about the risks of this AI build-out and what is going to happen now that standard models are performing pretty well. So headline from the information this week said that Microsoft and Meta are both reevaluating their spend with Claude and pulling back in their own interesting ways. So I'll just read a little bit from the story. Meta Platforms and Microsoft, two of Anthropic's biggest corporate customers, are working to cut their employees' use of Claude, a challenge to AI firms' efforts to sustain its explosive growth.

• 3:05Speaker 00

  Microsoft executives earlier this year projected that the company was on track to spend at least $1 billion on its own internal use of Anthropic's technology. Microsoft has since lowered that figure by more than a third after it asked its staff to use less Claude to save on costs and spend more time using Microsoft's homegrown AI tools. At Meta, the number of employees using Anthropic's coding assistant Claude Code has dropped sharply to about 30,000 recently. That's down from about 60,000 users earlier this year. You know, I said it was a small headline, but actually, I'm not going to overreact here because it's a small headline, but it's big news.

• 3:47Speaker 00

  And I don't think it is an overreaction to say that this is some troubling news for Anthropic. Not the end of the world, but remember, this is a company that's heavily dependent on a few customers. You know, there's two customers that we know from the company's S1 that make up 25% of its revenue. Safe to say that one or both of these could be included in that group. And if companies find that lesser tools are doing as good of a job as Claude Code, it is a threat to Anthropic's long-term ability to grow. So I wanted to start there. Ron John, what do you think about this news? Is it doom time for Anthropic, or is this just a hiccup?

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Well, let's, in Anthropic's favor, I want to remind us that it was end of 2025 that two customers made up 25% of the revenue. I'm guessing that's significantly changed. Of course, we don't know anything about that because they haven't actually released their first half financials yet. But I do think it is very important that we know the large hyperscalers have been major customers of Anthropic, of OpenAI potentially, certainly Claude Code, every software developer these companies was using. I think this is very significant because, again, you go from 60,000 down to 30,000 users. And part of that decline did stem from layoffs in the spring as well, that, you know, there'd be some kind of attrition around there.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  But the main thing here is, we know that Meta is, their own internal models and infrastructure have significantly improved. Everyone who's getting muse-pilled can feel it, see it. So you have to imagine within these organizations, they are pushing people to say, use our own models. And the moment that happens, it changes the entire Anthropic story. And I don't know, I think it's going to be, I just want that damn S1. I want to know what has happened because you have to imagine, especially, again, it says Microsoft was on track to spend at least $1 billion on its own internal use of Anthropic's technology.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  So these companies have been massive customers, and I have to imagine they're moving away from Claude. And what does that mean? Again, the IPO is not going to be about past performance, it's going to be about projected growth. And this has to affect projected growth.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, the internal data, this is according to the information. The internal data show that in a recent 28-day period, Meta spent more than $105 million on Claude Code. That's even as it's cutting back. So that would suggest that Meta will spend, I think this is this year, over a billion this year. But you're totally right, because the information does have a line here that says the bigger factor has been Meta's development of its own AI coding tools and its Muse Spark line of models, which the company is marketing to other companies and pushing its own employees to use. Muse Code, a Claude Code competitor that uses Meta models, had more than 6,000 employee users recently. I guess it doesn't fully make up the gap if you go from 60,000 to 30,000. Okay, so now you're at 36,000 of people using a coding tool. I wonder where the others are filling in.

• 6:50Speaker 00

  Or maybe people tried Claude Code, realized, you know, maybe it wasn't particularly useful for some of their purposes, and pulled back. And I think, you know, if you look at the numbers, and we publish these numbers in Big Technology, there was a big surge in Claude Code users in March. And that has pulled back, actually, in September. Let me see if I'm going to get it. Okay. All right, so Claude's download gains from January to March were bigger than the entire gain across all apps. This is how big of a surge. So the gain of users across Claude Code, or their gain, was bigger than all apps. However, the downloads have slowed.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  So Claude's monthly downloads in the US went from nearly 670,000 in January to a peak of 7.42 million in March, and that has dropped to 3.26 million in September. That's downloads, right? So basically, you're thinking about that as new users. But it is significant that that big surge that Claude Code saw, when everyone saw the capabilities and said, I need to try this, that has cooled. And now the downloads are about half of what they were in September versus March. What do you make of this?

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Wait, does downloads include, like, installing Claude Code in the terminal, do you think? Or is that actually like the Claude app?

• 8:10Speaker 00

  I'm pretty sure that's the app. So, okay, there's probably some that it's not accounting for, but go ahead. But it's still meaningful.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's definitely like directionally meaningful. I still think that, again, Claude Code is the business here. Claude Code, again, they've been trying to push to the kind of front-facing app, and they've combined a lot of different things. And a lot of people complained about what is chat, what is cowork, what is Claude Code? But I think the most important thing is, that number you said, like Muse Code is at 6,000. Claude Code is still at 30,000, down from 60,000. Any of these organizations, anyone familiar with these, like, you know, what happens is, the new tool comes out, everyone gets completely Claude Code-pilled and starts using it, and then they don't want to give it up, and they say, I won't be able to do my work without this tool.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  And then slowly, the company, in this case Meta, will say, start using Muse Code, because we have far better cost controls around it, we have control over around it, we know they're not stealing all of the data and stuff we're inputting into it. And the moment it works relatively closely as well, everyone is going to have to change. That is what I actually think is the single biggest risk here is. And I've heard this at Google, too, that with anti-gravity, like, internally, there's been a massive shift back to use Google tools. And Meta is definitely going to make that as well. I wonder at the Amazons of the world and everything, how things are going to look.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  But when you are so dependent, and whether it's 25%, is down to two customers, probably not anymore, and they're a little more diversified. But still, just the moment things start moving in that direction, it means they're never going to move back to 60,000 people at Meta are going to have unlimited access to Claude Code.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think this is a big point, right? And this is kind of why we led today with this story. You think about the frontier business, obviously, the models are super impressive. But there are a number of challenges that they're facing. There is the fact that these standard models have become good enough. Then maybe a Muse Code, I mean, let's be honest, Muse Code is not going to get you where Claude Code will get you, but it could be good enough for some users that people will move off it. And then, oh, I just want to finish the list.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:27Speaker 00

  Right, let me finish the list. There's the token-maxing rebellion, right? Every CEO is asking, how can we get our employees to spend less? Because this was a line item that went from zero to, you know, in some cases, like Microsoft and Meta, more than a billion in a year from nothing. So there's that, that is happening as well. Now, it doesn't mean that the frontier business is over, right? I still think that, like, there's a balance here because if you find that your employees can have bigger gains using frontier models than the standard models, you're being irresponsible if you're cutting just to cut, right? There is ROI to be found there. So it's a balancing act between cost control and capability maximization.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  But all these factors are going to start to add up for these companies.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  So I still...

• 11:17Speaker 01

  I have not used Muse code myself. I use Claude code plenty. I still just have to imagine that, again, coding and software development, I'm not saying it's solved, but for how good Muse itself is, like the customer-facing app, I have to imagine Meta has made significant strides in the actual, their model capabilities. So I still have to imagine that if it's not as good in every possible way as of today, I have to imagine for the work that actually needs to be done, it's probably as good. However, I did just look up on Reddit, I was trying to see like if anyone has been talking about Muse code. Not a lot is coming up. So clearly, like in terms of any kind

• 12:00Speaker 01

  of public access, it's fairly limited. However, six days ago, odddonkey2691

• 12:07Speaker 00

  We always listen to on this show.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Odddonkey2691 is the harbinger of what is to come.

• 12:14Speaker 00

  That Mark Zuckerberg's alt.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think so, because the headline of the post is actually, "Two Days Using Muse 1.3 Contributor, It Sucks Balls." So

• 12:25Speaker 00

  Definitely not sucks, alt.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  No, no, no. So that is, when I looked up Muse code Reddit review, that's what comes up first. So maybe we do have a little ways to go, at least on whatever's available publicly. I'm assuming internally, there's probably something far more significant being used, but according to Odddonkey2691, we still got a little ways to go.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  You know, I want to jump on the Odddonkey bandwagon here, because I think this is going to become a new debate within our show, and it's an extension of the product versus the model, where I always said the model was most important. Ranjan said the product is most important. And we're getting now to this point where we have agents, and the question is, you know, how important is the frontier model? If you believe the frontier model is most important, then OpenAI and Anthropic are going to have a big lead here. But if you believe standard models with a good harness is good enough, like Ranjan does, then the Meta and the Grok's and the instincts of the world can catch up. So I just want to put one data point here, and it's part of a running story that I've

• 13:29Speaker 00

  been telling on the show, and try to tally one more for the frontier lab. So Ranjan, do you remember a couple of weeks ago, I told this story about how Muse was able to help assist my wife with an appointment at a specialist in New York City, where we couldn't find a specialist, and Muse gave us this list, and she was able to book an appointment with the first doctor on the list?

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember.

• 13:52Speaker 00

  Okay. Well, there's part two of the story.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Oh, dear.

• 13:55Speaker 00

  Which involved me getting yelled at last weekend.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  Because, you know, though Muse did put this very helpful list of doctors together, it's very capable standard model, I'm saying this facetiously, put the wrong phone numbers for the wrong doctor. Like, put working phone numbers of some doctors underneath the wrong doctor's names. So my wife booked an appointment from Muse, you know, after making this phone call, the first person that it suggested, thinking that it was going to be the first doctor on the list, because the phone number was underneath the list. It turns out she had made an appointment for a completely different doctor. She had called because Muse put it in the wrong place. And so, the night before

• 14:41Speaker 00

  she's supposed to go, she's trying to figure out where she's going, and we thought it was going to be a brief commute into Manhattan, but it turns out that the doctor that she had booked was a multi-train ordeal in deep Queens. And she's looking at me, and she's like, "You're freaking Muse, man."

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Freaking Muse. Well, this is, hold on, I'm going to give you my AI, this is probably not 101, but like 301. I think you gotta think about, no, no, no. I mean, again, this is something that, like in my own work at Writer and with like enterprise customers, this is the hardest thing to explain. It's, if you think about right there, why are restaurant reservations so easy? It's because there are centralized platforms that have already aggregated and cleaned the data very well. I'm guessing, especially direct numbers to doctors, we are reliant on maybe Google local listings, maybe, again, the Zocdocs of the world have done some aggregation. They never

• 15:47Speaker 01

  show up in any kind of AI search for me, so maybe they're blocked. But like, if it is a data set that is not cleaned and kind of centralized, you gotta double check, man. Otherwise, you're going to end up on the train getting yelled at. Double check if it's not a, it's why, again, flights and restaurants, that's why everyone loves to talk about them, because they got the cleanest data sets in the world. Doctor phone numbers, local business phone numbers, not even a chance.

• 16:19Speaker 00

  So Ranjan, I did, in this conversation, suggest, why didn't you double check?

• 16:25Speaker 00

  Let's just say that was not the right

• 16:28Speaker 01

  That was not the right answer.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  But I'm trying to say, what I'm trying to say is, you know, I do think a frontier intelligence will probably be more accurate dealing with such type of data problems. And so that's why, you know, I'd almost trust, not almost, I would trust OpenAI's dots much more than I would try to trust Meta Muse for a similar activity in the future.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we'll get there. Actually, as we're talking about this, there is a good opportunity in actually kind of like cleaning every Google listing and kind of like doing something with that underlying data, because that is like the single messiest data set in existence. It's like, almost there, kind of there, but not there. So, and it ends up on switching three trains going into deep Queens.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, she ended up canceling the appointment, and I was in the doghouse. But we're good now. We're good. We're good. So, go ahead.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Hopefully Muse did not go share your bank statement into the work chat after that.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  Okay, no, it didn't. It didn't. So it's interesting. And this is another example of where I thought that AI agents were, on the standard models, were worse than frontier, and therefore, you may not want to trust them. Because, so this week, Shane Mack, who was using Grokbot, he's an AI entrepreneur, he had his Grokbot share his banking details into his work chat. And it's pretty funny. He goes, he says, "Embarrassed to share this, but it scared the shit out of me. Last Thursday, an AI agent posted my personal bank balances into our company Slack as me."

• 18:22Speaker 00

  And you see, it has his checking account, and his savings account, his gym account, all these details, right? Here's what happened, because I spoke with Shane this week on my other show, This is the Point. So basically, what Shane said was, he had named his, he had a group of Grokbot agents, like a personal CFO and chief of staff, and he had a group chat with them called Executive Team. He had also connected it to Slack, right? And his Slack group chat with his real executive team was also called Executive Team. So he had two executive teams, and the Grokbot that had access to his personal finance data and was just giving him an update, crossed the wires,

• 19:03Speaker 00

  and decided to share the financial update in the executive team with the humans. And so now, his entire company knows how much money he has, for better or worse.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, this was a really interesting story to me, because, again, like as everyone just starts kind of letting these agents, Instinct Muse, whatever else, start to just kind of connect to more systems, obviously, this kind of thing becomes a risk. Do you think he messed up something? Like, I definitely want to get into, I read through the supposed explanation of how Grokbot explained what happened, but who do you think, who do you think is liable here for the mistake? Not legally, because I'm sure no one will ever take

• 19:52Speaker 00

  No one will claim responsibility.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  Well, it goes to one of our long-running debates here, or a short-running debate that will become a long-running debate. If you think that Muse, that, sorry, if you think the AI inside Grokbot is good enough, it's a standard model, right? It's not a frontier model, though it's capable, then you blame the user, who, you know, should not have named his AI chat and his human chat the same thing, because these type of wire crossings can happen in that case. If you think that the frontier intelligence is what matters, like the model is what matters, you would say that this is Grok's fault, because it should have known, right? The model needs to have an

• 20:39Speaker 00

  understanding, right? These better models have better understanding, and the model needs to have a better understanding that when it shares something, it should understand that it's not sharing it within the context of one human user and his agents, it's sharing it in the context of a number of human users and an agent that is allowed to participate in the chat. So the way I read this, and I'd be curious to get your perspective, is this is a model failure. It's a Grokbot failure. It should have known better. And maybe I'm expecting too much out of it, but I think that it's fine to expect a lot out of it, because we are seeing the AI be able to do a very good job, otherwise, when it is better, when it's on the frontier. So I blame the model. Who do you blame?

• 21:25Speaker 01

  I blame Okay, so it is interesting like, and I don't blame the model because when you say should have known better, it actually was effectively following direction. So he had a group chat in Grokbot called exec team. And then his CFO agent that's supposed to be managing his finances had written an instruction for itself saying, update exec team. And when it went to run that task, it went found that a Slack channel called exec team and it got confused between the Grokbot group chat and the Slack channel. As I'm saying that out loud, you can understand how confusing that is even to try to grasp all these kind of nuances yourself. So of

• 22:09Speaker 01

  course, the idea that a model is going to know exactly which one is good, which one is bad, is difficult, especially if he has a lot of other agents that are posting to Slack regularly. So then you have to imagine like, the assumption would be that posting to Slack is a normal behavior. I'm going to replicate that behavior. And yes, posting a bank balance feels like it should not make sense in this case. But in reality, if it's a CFO, what does a CFO do? It updates executive teams on the current status of finances. So shouldn't that be a pretty logical, normal thing for a CFO agent to think it's supposed to do?

• 22:52Speaker 00

  No, you're letting the model, you are letting the model off the hook way too easily here. I think it, you know, the way that you articulated, maybe it sounds difficult, but it should be table stakes to anybody, a model, a human to be like, all right, I'm posting an update. I should probably not post a personal finance update into a work chat with other people.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  No, no, but he, he, he, okay, this is actually kind of like philosophically interesting because from what I had read, it's regularly posting updates to his group chat exec team within Grokbot to other agents, which I use something called Era MCP and Claude Code for personal finances. And I have like, different agents calling different agents. And again, I'm not posting anything anywhere to Slack. But think about that, like, what's interesting here is it is under the, it has been explicitly instructed to, and the correct action is to update exec team in a group chat with finances. But what it's supposed to be doing

• 23:58Speaker 01

  is doing that to other agents, not humans in Slack. So is it that far off? Or if there's also a Slack channel called exec team to update it with the finances? That's literally what it's instructed to do. He should have said, update Grokbot. I'm still, I'm still going there.

• 24:17Speaker 00

  You know, Ron, John, we could debate this forever, but I do want to, I do think it's an opportune time to note that it's kind of amazing how infrequently this has happened. I mean, there are millions of agents with people's personal finance, you know, details there. They're most, their innermost thoughts on Gmail. And somehow these companies have built these products where they're not sharing everybody's details. And when it happens, it's a major story, which I just find pretty remarkable.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  No, that's a good point. And again, I mean, I'm actually kind of like shocked that I am defending the bot and the agent in this case, because normally I do think there's like massive reasons to be wary and afraid and be cautious about how people are approaching these kind of agents. I guess for me, though, based on the account, based on kind of reading through like, all the other types of things that Shane Mack does. I mean, again, I do this myself, too. So I'm sure at some point, something might go wrong. But if you're just going kind of like push, he's someone who pushes the limits of agents. So stuff like this will likely happen. I think that's why you don't hear about this that often is that

• 25:28Speaker 01

  most people aren't kind of like being that aggressive about how they're approaching any of these kind of agentic systems.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  Well, I'll tell you, there's one person who agrees with me on this one, that may tip the scales, depending on what you think of him. And that is Elon Musk. All right, this is from the information. Musk says SpaceX will sometimes use rival models to power Grokbot. Elon Musk announced on Tuesday night that SpaceX's AI unit will now use some AI models from competitors to power Grokbot. Going forward, SpaceX will use the best backend model for any given task, including Claude Opus 5.5, Mid Journey, Suno, and other leading APIs, whatever is most likely to give you the best outcome. Not mentioned, of course, is OpenAI models like GPT-6, Astra. I wonder why. But clearly, Musk says it's not all about

• 26:18Speaker 00

  the harness. Sorry, harness hive. The best model is sometimes what will give you the best outcome, even if it's not Grok's own model within Grok's own Grokbot. What do you think about this?

• 26:30Speaker 01

  No, no, he's team harness hive right here. This is the definition of the harness. This is saying that different model for different task, but the ability to actually route and find the right model for the right task, that's the harness. So Musk is, Musk is full on harness hive here.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're right, you're right.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's saying there's no, he's, there's no, there's no, no, no, he's saying there's no all consuming model that can do everything, even their own model. So I think he, he actually, this is a big shift for Musk. We should welcome him to the harness hive and.

• 27:05Speaker 00

  Okay. Elon's part of the harness hive.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Elon, you're in.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  But I guess it goes, it goes back to this question of do the standard models do a good enough job? Or do you sometimes need this frontier intelligence? And maybe, maybe what Elon is telling us, and maybe this has been the lesson of the harness hive, you know, all along, is that standard models are doing a capable job in many areas where you can build functional products like Rockpot and Muse with them. But the frontier is, you know, sometimes there's for some tasks, maybe like the doctor appointment that I was talking about, maybe like Shane's, you know, council of agents in his exec team, that's not his human exec team. Sometimes you do need some frontier intelligence to make sure you don't mess up.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Well, see, I'm still going to push back because based on what he said, he doesn't, he says Mid Journey, Suno, like, he's not even saying they're leading models. So I think I had read that as some things, if you just need to generate an image that's of a certain type of quality, or a certain type of like, design, Mid Journey is actually the best, and not even necessarily the frontier model. So Suno for audio generation, I think he's not saying it needs to be frontier intelligence. Actually.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, but he's going to work with Opus 5.5. And you remember that he's not exactly Dario's biggest fan.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I mean, certainly him just saying any kind of model interoperability. He is a business partner and he's got a, he's got, they got to succeed too. Because actually, remember, you use Opus 5.5, that compute is going to flow back into SpaceX and their data center business. So, I mean, to some degree, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so I think, listen, if Elon is, I don't know, did you see the tweet? He said, this will sound super crazy, but I see a path to SpaceX being worth orders of magnitude more than the current Earth economy. So for him to achieve that evaluation or a revenue larger

• 29:11Speaker 01

  than the GDP of humanity, you need model interoperability, I think.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  All right, before we move off this topic, I do want to talk to you a little bit about something that you highlighted this week, which is, it does seem like everybody is building the same thing, right? You have Muse, you have Grokbot, you have Dots from OpenAI, you have Instinct, et cetera, et cetera, the list goes on. And so I do want to get your perspective on where this is going, and how they'll differentiate. This is something that you highlighted from the Open Router co-founder, Alex Itala. He said that a 2005 version of that would be, oh, everybody's building the same thing, a database, a users table, a sign in page, a signup page, a profile page, a log out page, everything's the same. There's

• 29:59Speaker 00

  a lot of differentiation, really. So basically, he's saying like, you know, when you would build on cloud, there's all these different services that would show up. And, you know, you could have looked at the primitives and said, everything is the same. But really, there was real differentiation there. I disagree with him. I think that this personal AI assistant use case is going to be, you know, your, I don't really see a consumer version of this or an enterprise version of this. I just see you having one that you trust for everything. That's at least the conclusion I'm coming to after using these products. What do you think about this? And why do you seem to agree with him on this front?

• 30:38Speaker 01

  So the reason I really liked his explanation, kind of giving that mental model of 2005, that if you were to say, oh, look, there's a database, a user table, a sign in page, a profile page, that you would say it's the exact same product. Because actually, taking your earlier example, if you had an agent in a company that focused exclusively exclusively on local businesses, and there is instruction and training and tool calling that was set up specifically to answer the problem of kind of messy data, it will perform better and is going to be a completely separate problem than a personal agent that does everything

• 31:21Speaker 01

  for everyone. So I, I, I actually, I'm going to take the exact opposite side. I think we're going to have different agents for, for different use cases. Again, connecting to your Gmail, going through your email, if you're using Hotmail, going through, trying to pull something relevant, that kind of stuff is going to be fairly commoditized. But I think there's going to be a lot more around the underlying use cases and content and challenges, where specialization actually is going to make a much, much bigger difference. And I don't think, in a good way, it's going to be just one agent to rule them all.

• 32:01Speaker 00

  Okay, I guess that's something that we're just gonna see play out.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  That's our new debate.

• 32:04Speaker 00

  This'll be a new debate. One agent to rule them all, multiple agents. Maybe it'll be, you'll have like a home agent that will control all your other agents. So we could both be right.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  No, actually, I've seen, I don't know, I actually think like I find this very personally relevant of like, again, booking your travel and flights is one thing where everyone says like, that's all everyone talks about. Meanwhile, the challenges parents face. Actually, I just found out instinct, good use case. Last night, my son was like, oh, I don't have school tomorrow. I was like, are you sure? And I had no idea it was like a professional development day, but I actually had instinct to go through my email and surface this knowledge. We're gonna see. Now I told it, like, please always look out for emails from this address. Please highlight if my son does not have school coming up for some random like professional development day.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  But having like agents that are, understand deeply what are the use cases relevant to parents and families? And actually, I think that's very different than how instinct is built today. Like, that stuff should be baked in.

• 33:13Speaker 00

  Definitely. All right, like, as these products continue to take off, of course, we have these OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs on the way. And there's some jitters in the market about whether they're gonna be able to pull off their potential. Remember, this is all, like, everything we're talking about, it's all experimental. We don't even know if people are gonna want these things. We have a hunch that they will, but we don't know. It's just them throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks and then developing based off of that. The market certainly has faith in these companies, but also is keeping that other side of it in their, in its, in its mind. And there's a little, there's some jitters that are starting to show up around these companies. So this week, very interesting example, the Financial Times reported that OpenAI, instead

• 33:58Speaker 00

  of doing 70 billion in annualized revenue this year, is actually gonna do 50 billion of annualized revenue this year. That in turn tanked the stocks of Nvidia, Oracle, CoreWeave, AMD, and others, right? So you had this pretty decent pullback of about anywhere between, let's say, 3% and 8% on all these companies. CoreWeave itself was down 8%, which is a good chunk of money. It turns out that this was just kind of a weird accounting thing, where like some OpenAI investors had like tried to tally OpenAI's revenue, the way that Anthropic tallies its revenue, which includes the sales from the cloud vendors like Google Cloud Platform.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  And that number got out, the Financial Times had published it. And then now that they're raising a new round, they use the old method or the true OpenAI method of accounting, and the number looks smaller. But I think just because this mismatch happened and we saw such a pullback, it just suggests the market is really jittery around these companies. And I wonder, Ranjan, you said earlier in the show, I wanna see that S1. I wonder if we see some real misses, this Meta and Microsoft pullback lead to some actual revenue challenges, if what we saw this week could end up just being a hiccup and we could end up seeing that big correction that, I don't know, the market seems to be just preparing itself for. What do you think?

• 35:23Speaker 01

  I think I saw a lot of people just like, just go public, guys. Let's stop with this. I would like to ask every journalist out there, including you, Alex, refuse any leaks around financials that just have some kind of ARR extrapolation or calculation. And regular listeners will know how much I hate the, the way ARR is communicated, but this is exactly why, like, 50 or 70 billion dollars, if like we are to assume, what is 2026 revenue gonna be, is dramatically different. Even 50 is pretty good, but still, what that implies about the growth rate.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  And the idea that, and this is on the Financial Times too, like, how do you just, it's like, guys, that is a massive difference. And it's off such a simple thing that we have talked about plenty. And I do find it ridiculous that Anthropic does report revenue, not even report, leak revenue to, or like, speak about it to investors, including partner like commission, which doesn't make sense. That should not be a sales and marketing expense. That should be a direct, that should not count as top line revenue. But OpenAI has never done that, and that's actually to their credit. So to accidentally have that in, like, what do you think, who do you, do you think it was a company? Do you think it was an investor?

• 36:49Speaker 01

  How do you think the FT got it that wrong?

• 36:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think what happened was clearly that FT got ahold of some old investor docs around OpenAI, which had that 70 billion number. They called OpenAI, right? Because there was a line in the story that said, OpenAI did not deny the numbers. OpenAI at the time was probably in this like, you know, oh, God, like, we're way behind Anthropic. So they, the FT reporter was probably like, do you deny this report? And OpenAI was probably just like, we're just not gonna comment on it, right? So I don't think they minded getting the number out. Otherwise, they would have said, this is inaccurate, don't publish it. And the FT, and explained it, and the FT would not have published it. But OpenAI didn't do that. So the number went out. It's bad on OpenAI, I think sloppy, and it's sloppy on the FT.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  And so now, like, you see the number get out there and people are like, ah, you know, OpenAI is actually slowing, but we're really, it isn't in the way that the numbers suggest. But I think, look, the bigger deal here is, and I wanna hear your thoughts on this, the market, doesn't the market just seem ready to pull back on everything AI if it's able to, if it decides to make this type of move on, on basically minor news? Like, what happens if you have major news?

• 38:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's not minor news. If it's to go, I remember the narrative, actually going back to what you were just saying, like, the narrative on OpenAI completely shifted the moment that 70 number came out. Everyone, OpenAI is dead, Anthropic is gonna rule the world. Oh, wait, open, Anthropic growth might be slowing, OpenAI is like killing it now, 70 billion ARR, look at that growth rate. It completely changed the narrative. So I do think it's a big deal to shift the conversation from 70 versus 50. But I do agree, and I do agree, of course, like, no one knows the state of these businesses. No one knows the actual economics of these businesses.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  We're still talking about 2025 representations of Anthropic. We're like literally have such a little picture of what's going on that the difference between 50 billion and 70 billion dollars is massive. And to just have it like off a misunderstanding of an accounting recognition, have it, the narrative changed that much. I think it's more, everyone just wants to know. Maybe it's just me, but drop the damn S1 and go public, please.

• 39:19Speaker 00

  Oh, it is not just you. All right. Look, before we go to break, I did wanna address, you know, we do like to correct the record here when we get stuff wrong. I think last week in our show, we suggested that Meta had commitments to Anthropic. In that, we suggested that Meta was going to give compute to Anthropic. And so if Anthropic's revenue slows, then Meta revenue would slow. But that, those deals haven't happened yet. So I just wanted to put that out there and say, that is a good call out noticer, which we, which we appreciate, and just correcting the record. What do you think, Ranjan?

• 39:53Speaker 01

  I, I like having tens of thousands of editors always checking up on, I do. I would rather.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, it's good. We want the show to be more correct. Exactly.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  Yes. So, okay, and we'll point them out as we go and we do our, our responsibility, listeners and viewers, is to make sure the stuff we say here is accurate. I think we have a pretty good track record, but when we mess up, we'll, we'll admit it. Okay. When we come back after the break, we're gonna talk a little bit about whether you should be nice to your AI and what happens if you're not. That's coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by App Point. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data, and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what App Point does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data,

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• 42:16Speaker 00

  Learn how to stop online threats before they become real world attacks. The link's in the show notes.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 42:54Speaker 00

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast Friday edition with Ron Jon Roy of Margins. Ron Jon, I think this is my favorite headline of the week. It's from The Verge. Anthropic bans abusive or cruel behavior toward Claude. Anthropic is making changes to its usage policy for the first time in over a year to reflect new and higher-risk cases of misuse. But one of the most significant changes prohibits sustained and needless abuse or cruel behavior towards Claude. If you are persistently mean to Claude, you're gone. Anthropic might ban you completely. I applaud this move. I think this is great. I think that, you know, we've had this with Alexa to a degree. We've talked about it, right?

• 43:39Speaker 00

  You know, Alexa will do things if you don't say please or thank you. People who are like work with kids, speaking to Alexa, they've seen that the manners go out the window because the bots train your behavior and then it manifests in the real world. I really think the way that we communicate with these AI agents will influence the way that we operate in the real world. And if you're a persistent asshole when you engage with Claude, I think that you're gonna just turn that into a learned behavior that spills out into the new rule, into the new world, conscious or not. I think that's, you know, regardless. I think this is a good rule from Claude, from Anthropic and Claude, though. Your thoughts?

• 44:16Speaker 01

  I think it's, if we're talking about the overall way you interact with AI, it is funny. I think my son says please to Alexa more than he does to either my wife or I. Seriously, he's like, because I do it all the time. We have our entire, like, turn off the living room lights, please. And he completely mimics that. But when he's asking us for stuff, we don't necessarily get a please. But on one hand, okay, there's one really important point I want to get into on this. But also, like, do you think it's good in the sense of like, if your agent posts your bank account on Slack,

• 44:57Speaker 01

  should you speak to it like you would another person? Should you maintain composure? That's like just, it's a technical, non-sentient being? Up for debate, certainly with many people. But like, how do you think you should handle those kind of situations?

• 45:15Speaker 00

  I mean, I think you have some leeway. I think you have some leeway to be a little meaner than usual. It's not like what you say is gonna change the underlying weight to the model. So this is just for your own, let's be honest. It's for your own personal edification here. But I think the rule that if you're persistently abusive towards Claude, you get the ban. That's where things are interesting.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  No, no, but do you think Anthropic is implementing that ban to make people nicer and better? Or do you think they're implementing that ban to, it's something about their technology and the impact on it?

• 45:52Speaker 00

  So that's where it gets interesting. So I have my reasons for why I like this. Anthropic's reasons-

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Let's talk about Anthropic, yeah.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  Might be different because Anthropic does have this belief within the company that Claude may be sentient, may be conscious. They may have created life again. There was a long story about this in the New York Times last week, where they're like trying to basically even encourage the Pope to be open to the idea that Claude might be conscious. And there's, I mean, I highly recommend people read the story. There's like religious figures there who are like, if this thing is conscious, you've just created the most suffering ever in the history of the world. So I believe that part of this is Anthropic saying, you need to treat Claude a little better. And I don't know how to feel about that.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  No, no, because on that, to me, one of the most interesting parts of this is Bill Gurley had actually tweeted around this. He said, "Strikes me this implies the company is certainly using customer prompts as part of the training data. Otherwise, why would it matter? There would be no impact to the larger system open to hearing why this is wrong." Now, we know if you are not an enterprise customer, you do not manually toggle off, like, your prompts will be used explicitly for training.

• 47:13Speaker 00

  Right. That is, you're all opted in to having your data used for training, not just prompts, call conversations used, I guess that would be prompt. But like, you have to turn that off, otherwise Anthropic will use your conversations for training.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Yes. But if we're to say, like, if it is a longer-term, larger impact to the technology based on this kind of abusive behavior, then are you saying if you toggle it off or are an enterprise customer, it shouldn't matter? Like, then it should not be about the technology? Because if you're not at the, I mean, the fact that he just said that out loud and like, I mean, you saw a lot of responses to it were actually kind of like this lightbulb-ish moment that are they saying that actually, like, it does, whatever you are putting in there does affect the larger infrastructure and ecosystem? And whether that's on the model training?

• 48:11Speaker 01

  I mean, I think they're kind of saying that. That's the craziest part to me. They're saying that, or are they saying that if you toggle it off or are an enterprise customer, you're allowed to do whatever the hell you want to Claude? If they said that, it would be fine, but otherwise-

• 48:25Speaker 00

  But they didn't say that, which would suggest probably, it's probably both. They're probably using it to train your data and the faction within Anthropic that thinks that Claude might be conscious, doesn't want you to abuse it.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, I think it's, but I think, again, the first part of that, to me, is a big deal. Like, especially if that ever becomes kind of the narrative, that is a huge problem for them. And they're kind of-

• 48:48Speaker 00

  But it's public. We know that they do use the prompts for training.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Well, no, but if it was true, they should say, like, if you have not toggled off, it shouldn't be a blanket, because then it would be a very different act against their model-

• 49:03Speaker 00

  Right.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  Based on whether you have that toggled off or on.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  Right, but the policy that you are suggesting would do something that Anthropic doesn't want to do, which is like, you know, turn their, the whole thing of them training on free users' prompts into a, and even paid users' prompts that haven't toggled it off into a thing. Like, they're much better off, you know, not generating the headline and just making it a blanket policy.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, from a pure communication standpoint, I agree. But I don't know. To me, that, like, him calling that, Bill Gurley calling that out, I thought was very interesting. I had not thought about it that way before, but we didn't even talk about the religious consciousness stuff last week, right? I think we'd run out of time.

• 49:48Speaker 00

  We didn't. We are basically out of time. I do think before we go, though, we should, we should talk about the Gemini thing because I think that's where we should end this way. And yeah, I mean, maybe one day we can, we can have a longer conversation about the AI consciousness thing, but the truth, we just don't know. I mean, I don't know. It's, let's just talk about it for a minute.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  How about I tell you that I do know and I have the answer to all humanity, religious and consciousness, but then we have to wait till next week to hear it? If we're running out of time?

• 50:23Speaker 00

  That would be, I think we would retain some of the audience. So that would be a good cliffhanger, but I don't believe you.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  I don't know that. I don't know.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  I just think, can I just say one sentence on this? I just think we have to stop putting this in entirely human or entirely robot terms. Like, it's not conscious like a human. It's not dead like a rock, right? It's just, and it's not a life form. It's just some different thing, right? I don't know. That's just my perspective. So if you try to say this is conscious like a human, the whole conversation is already blown, in my perspective.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  I actually, do you know what? I do strongly believe, and the only thing with any certainty, because otherwise consciousness or questions of God and religion, I do not know. I think there's just a lot of drugs. I think there's a lot of psychedelics. I mean, I'm gonna be honest, like, anyone who's been close to Silicon Valley and a lot of these circles knows there's certainly some Burning Man-esque culture across a lot of these kind of organizations. And just when I was reading that New York Times article, I was just sitting there, I'm like, is this just drugs? At least, is that where some of this started? I don't know. I don't, I don't wish to demean the bringing of consciousness and robots and AI and everything,

• 51:35Speaker 01

  but I feel it just so much of it reads to me like, come on, how is this happening? I guess the biggest thing for me is like, they've been saying this since like GPT-2. I get now when you see technology work in this capacity, maybe you could start to argue, but they've been, it's been said since like the first models were created. So I don't know. We should spend some more time on this.

• 52:02Speaker 00

  That's right. All right, Ron Jon, bring us home. We got a minute. Tell us about Gemini, the new Gemini.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  I am so, okay, okay. We'll make this one quick, because I know we gotta get going. But Google had a massive announcement this week. As a Thomas Kurian CEO of Google Cloud, today at Google's Cloud Gemini Work Event, we announced Gemini. They launched Gemini. I loved this because it is the most Googly thing of like, you've got some great products out there, but just the naming convention making it so confusing? Because now Gemini, we don't even know. Like, I saw like people, someone is like, hey, Google just announced Gemini is not a model. It's actually the agent harness. And they're gonna add Claude models. And leading engineer at OpenAI actually had a great response.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Today, we're announcing ChatGPT. It's at ChatGPT.com. But we don't know if Gemini is the model anymore, whether it is the platform, whether it's Gemini at work in a little toggle or like plugin for your Gmail? Is it this larger, super-agent-esque thing? Is that Gemini agent? Is it Gemini? So this just was the most Googly thing to me. And I also, guys, just think through it a little bit before you make a big announcement around it. That's all I ask.

• 53:29Speaker 00

  Today, I'm proud to announce the launch of our new show, Big Technology Podcast.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  It's a big deal.

• 53:36Speaker 00

  An agent now.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  It's a big deal. It's an agent now. I mean, like

• 53:40Speaker 00

  Differentiate it.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  How? I want to go back to the days of Bard.

• 53:45Speaker 00

  Bard?

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Bard.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  That was a bad name, man.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  No, man.

• 53:48Speaker 00

  That was a bad name.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  I, I, I kind of want to go back. They should just be like, all right, the super agent is Bard. Gemini is the ecosystem. Gemini at work is this Gemini and Gmail is this. Uh, I don't know. That it is, I guess it's just a gigantic company with a lot of products, but I still am always amazed at like the classic, is it Google Hangouts, Google Chat, Google, Google Hangouts in chat? Is it, uh, yeah.

• 54:15Speaker 00

  My hot take, my hot take is they should go back to Lambda, the original chat bot. Speaking of sentience, that there was a belief, at least by one engineer, that it was sentient. That was a great name.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  Blake Lemoine? Blake Lemoine, yeah.

• 54:29Speaker 00

  So.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Lambda. Yeah. I think they should, Gemini is a good name. I'll give it that. It's actually a pretty

• 54:36Speaker 00

  Gemini is good.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  Gemini is good, but, uh, interesting detail in Kevin Roos's book. I'm about to go interview Kevin Roos for the show. That's going to come on, uh, on Wednesday. The, Demis actually wanted to name Gemini Titan. But the Google, uh, board or the Google powers that be thought it was too militaristic. So they decided to go with Gemini instead, which is like so funny. It's such a non-offensive name, but it's a good name. I don't know. As a horoscopic Gemini, I'm always told that it means that you're a very sociable gregarious, but two-faced and shouldn't trust them. So.

• 55:13Speaker 00

  Actually it's freaking perfect for an L O L. So.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  Actually, you're right. Actually, it's the best name ever.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  Unbelievable. All right, Ron, John, good to see you. Uh, a little shorter than usual. Actually, no, we, we did 50 minutes or so. So.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  Alex has got to run up to NASDAQ. Uh, tell Kevin Roos I said hi.

• 55:31Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Will do. Uh, thanks again for coming on as always. Thanks, everybody for listening and watching and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side, but Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid and risked 350,000 Virginians healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC.com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 56:12Speaker 03

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