alt Hacker NewsApple is a pretty difficult company to deal with on a B2B basis.
If you have terms that conflict with theirs, they aren’t very flexible. Anthropic can be similarly difficult, and their needs from a business perspective probably don’t align with Siri. I would imagine that Google has a more flexible/long term approach to absorbing some risk in a revenue share arrangement than anthropic who generally wants cash.
Anthropic’s only purpose is to juice whatever KPI‘s are gonna increase their IPO market cap.
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You say that, but don’t you think at this point they actually believe some of the stuff they say about safety and the future of humanity? It’s tough in this day and age not to be overly cynical but they did draw a line in the sand at the DoD and that wasn’t for IPO numbers…
Yeah, that makes more sense to me than "Anthropic had them over the barrel". Which seemed quite odd given the relative cash positions and installed base of each firm.
Tbh I thought their purpose was to power the war machine
Good thoughts.
The last sentence doesn't make that much sense to me though. An agreement with Apple to be the lead AI partner would likely juice the IPO a great deal. The financial details wouldn't matter much for the IPO (as the initial financial commitments are going to be small but the halo effect would be real - I think it would in the market anyway).
I think Anthropic has real commitment to their way of doing things which can cause short term issues (and hurt the IPO). And they seem willing to keep those values rather than just making deals to pump the IPO. As you say Apple also sticks to their way of doing things even if it frustrates their partners.
I think not being the lead partner with Apple may well be good for Anthropic long term. But if all you cared about was the IPO just agreeing to Apple's terms likely would have been the best option.
These SpaceX, Anthropic and Open AI possible IPOs are so extreme it is hard to make judgements about them; so maybe there are Anthropic IPO issues to an Apple agreement that I don't appreciate.