It'll get paid from revenue, not by redirecting employee salaries. All that AI+compute is literally what customers pay Anthropic for.

Big AI labs are not software companies where payroll dominates expenses. They're capex-heavy industrial entities; it just so happens that the "machines" (whose output they sell) are nominally the same category as the devices that their knowledge worker employees use on their desks.

VC mostly, since Anthropic is not profitable.

Compute (and IP theft) is the raw materials being used by the AI companies to build their products (the models).

It doesn't make sense to compare OpenAIs or Anthropics compute spend to that of our average software company, because different products require different raw materials. Dropbox also use way more storage than Snapchat, that's an equally silly comparison.