The “but ads” logic fails basic sense checks. There isn’t enough ad money to go around to make up the gaps. With the big ad players like Google, Meta, and Amazon all shutting Anthropic out of their ecosystem there’s very little evidence that Anthropic can steal away enough of that as revenue to save itself.

In the “but they’ll slow down training and so will become more profitable” thinking is in big trouble given the pace of open models. They’ll then be even less competitive with free options and so even less reason to buy from Anthropic.