Once they reduce the spend, many other might have caught up.
Chinese models are doing a lot for a tenth of the price.
Right. Even if they do keep the spend up, we may still soon end up at a point where a cheap open model is good enough. It could be hosted locally or provided through any of the cloud providers without any revenue going to OpenAI or Anthropic.
They have some stickiness to the tooling people are used to, but those can be overcome when there's a significant price difference for the same results.
Re:Anthropic IPO
by CapmCrackaWaka on Thursday November 12, 2026 @01:39PM
(#50472041)
I don’t think the more is ever going to be the actual LLM’s, but the harnesses and support around them. If Anthropic can own the model and the harness setup, I could see there being some efficiency gains there that would be worth something.
> I haven't yet seen a good explanation of how companies like OpenAI and Anthropic
By lobbying the government to coordinate a slowdown "for safety." Obviously, Chinese labs won't and will therefore will pull ahead.
There is no scenario where they could realistically stop R&D. One solution would be to have the American taxpayer pay for R&D, sold as staying ahead in the AI arms race: so I'm expecting such lobbying attempts any month now. Hopefully the recently elected representatives follow through on their promises to represent their constituents.
The thing is if models become 'good enough' that the main value is in running existing models, those will quickly proliferate and be available for commodity cost from many competing providers. Why pay Anthropic when I can just pay AWS or Azure directly to run whatever future version of Qwen does the job for me?
If the value actually remains in the frontier models, you can't stop spending on training new ones or you'll eventually be left behind by your competitors and they'll capture that value.
I haven't yet seen a good explanation of how companies like OpenAI and Anthropic will make the transition to a lower cost structure while maintaining the revenue that they currently get for being on the cutting edge of LLMs.