this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2026
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Can't wait to end up holding the bag for this because they're "too big to fail" again.
So much of their revenue is government contracts. Especially with the Pentagon.
Really can't be overstated how they've wormed themselves into the Military Industrial Complex.
A lot of their revenue is also investment from hardware and software vendors that are using the revenue from the AI companies for those investments.
It's like the Enron scheme, but instead of one company inventing fake companies to move money around to increase revenue and drive up prices to hide the fact they're hemorrhaging money while the C-suite tries to divest their own money from the company, it's multiple companies working together to move money around to increase revenue and drive up prices to hide the fact they're hemorrhaging money while the major investors try to find a way to cash out.
Anthropic is anxious to do their IPO because they know their business model is fucked, and their shareholders want out.
Are they? This is productive capital being rented out at a profit to the end users. And the end users are, as often as not, big public institutions with near bottomless accounts.
I might argue they are rapidly exhausting scare natural resources. And you're welcome to do the material analysis on whether dumping 50 gal of water and 100 Mbtus of energy through a digital engine to make a "Farting Peach Says It's Voting For The Green Party in 2026!" viral Facebook ad is benefiting humanity.
But merely observing that money is changing hands between big economic players doesn't let us know if something is profitable. You're describing the basic functions of a financial economy.
That's the popular line. People said the same thing about Tesla when it went public.
It's always us normies that end up footing the bill and feeling the pain (sometimes literally to the point of dying).
Every fucking time.