2025-12-06 09:01:34
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that parts of the AI industry are taking on excessive financial risk.
Speaking at The New York Times DealBook Summit, Amodei said companies committing hundreds of billions of dollars to data-center buildouts face a “real dilemma,” because the economic value of AI may not scale quickly enough to justify those investments.
The Claude head noted that while data centers take years to construct, the timing of revenue growth is highly uncertain, creating conditions where some firms are “YOLO-ing” into decisions that could backfire.
Though Amodei declined to name specific companies, his remarks clearly alluded to rivals such as OpenAI, which has committed around $1.4 trillion to future infrastructure.
He cautioned that mismatched timelines between investment and payoff, coupled with the rapid depreciation of AI chips, could expose overly aggressive players to severe financial strain.
He said: “If you don’t buy enough compute you can’t serve customers, but if you buy too much you can go bankrupt.”
Anthropic has taken a more measured approach, recently announcing a $50 billion data-center programme while focusing on steady enterprise adoption rather than mass-market products.
The company has grown revenue from $100 million in 2023 to an expected $8-10 billion this year, but Amodei stressed he would be “really dumb” to assume that pace will continue.
His comments follow industry criticism of OpenAI after its CFO floated the idea of government guarantees for its infrastructure loans.
Amodei said Anthropic aims to plan for “almost all worlds,” while others seem “constitutionally” drawn to unwise risk-taking.
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