Weekly Top Picks #118
Anthropic's $30B revenue / China won the global race / AI scapegoating layoffs / Mythos / Gen Z against AI / "AI is conscious?" is the wrong question
Hey there, I’m Alberto! 👋
Each week, I publish long-form AI analysis covering culture, philosophy, and business for The Algorithmic Bridge. Paid subscribers also get Monday how-to guides and Friday news commentary. I publish occasional extra articles. If you’d like to become a paid subscriber, here’s a button for that:
THE WEEK IN AI AT A GLANCE
Money & Business: Anthropic’s annualized revenue jumped from $19B to $30B in a month; Meta’s 60-trillion-token Claude binge may explain part of the spike.
Geopolitics: Chinese AI models now power 30% of global workloads, up from 1% in late 2024, while Meta quietly abandoned open source.
Work & Workers: Nearly 80,000 tech workers lost jobs in Q1 2026, with companies using AI as cover for post-pandemic overhiring corrections.
Products & Capabilities: Claude Mythos Preview is impressive on paper, but may be more about IPO marketing and regulatory positioning than anything.
Culture & Society: Gen Z’s AI excitement dropped 14 points to 22% while anger rose to 31%; even daily users are losing faith.
Philosophy: Dario Amodei says AI could be conscious; Anil Seth says AI isn’t conscious; Barton Friedland says it’s the wrong question.
THE WEEK IN THE ALGORITHMIC BRIDGE
(FREE) How to Think About AI Like a Long-Term Investor: Everything worth having—skills, relationships, expertise, including AI fluency—follows the logic of compound interest: early returns look negligible, but consistency over time builds value that accelerates, which is why starting now with AI (even badly) beats waiting for it to mature.
(FREE) Inside the AI Industry’s Most Expensive Mistake: Token-based “thinking” is an expensive architectural crutch—AI models should reason in latent space the way humans think in sensations rather than words—but the irony is that if they did, Meta couldn’t have distilled Claude’s reasoning traces to bootstrap Muse Spark.
(PAID) What Happens When AI Gets Too Good at One Thing: Claude Mythos is a narrow superintelligence—superhuman at finding zero-day vulnerabilities but not AGI—and Anthropic's decision to withhold it is simultaneously genuine safety concern, IPO marketing, and a preview of a future where the most powerful models are never sold as consumer products.
MONEY & BUSINESS
We’re all on a Claudeonomics run
Anthropic is generating more annualized revenue than OpenAI. The trajectory is crazy. $9B in January. $14B in February. $19B by early March. $30B in early April.
Wait, what? It jumped $10B+ in one month. What is going on? Claude is a great product, but this is… hard to believe. (OpenAI was at roughly $24B on March.)
Anthropic's financial health couldn't be better. Claude Code subscriptions have quadrupled since January. Enterprise customers with $1M+ annual contracts crossed 500. Eight of the Fortune 10 are Claude customers. The growth is robust, but the acceleration from $19B to $30B in a month demands an explanation beyond “enterprise going well.”
Enter Claudeonomics (I covered it in passing here).
A Meta employee built a leaderboard called “Claudeonomics” tracking token consumption company-wide of Claude models (no longer active because we mocked them). In the last 30 days tracked, they burned through 60 trillion tokens. The top user spent 281 billion.
How much does that cost?
We don’t know which model Meta runs, but there are reasons to think it skews toward Opus 4.6, Anthropic’s most capable ($5/$25 per million input/output tokens). Meta doesn’t need to optimize for cost when it’s spending $115–135B on AI infrastructure this year, with an ad empire printing $40B+ per quarter. At this volume, for a customer this size, enterprise discounts of up to 30-50% are standard.
At a 40% discount: roughly $540M/month. Annualized, ~$6.5B.
That, alone, would cover most of the spike in Anthropic's April run-rate revenue. The coincidence of Meta’s Claudeonomics gimmick and Anthropic’s revenue surge is, at the very least, something to think about… However, there are other tricks Meta is probably doing that would reduce the overall spend significantly.
All in all, I think Meta is a big client but just one factor among others for Anthropic’s recent growth.
Two caveats on the revenue figures.
Annualized run rate is monthly revenue times twelve, which assumes this month repeats forever (it doesn’t). If Meta’s binge was a concentrated push to prepare Muse Spark, next month’s number could look very different. But, at the same time, even if the assumption that Meta is the reason behind the spike, it isn’t the only driver: Claude Code’s adoption across thousands of enterprises is not a temporary fashion.
Sources: Anthropic, The Information, The New York Times
GEOPOLITICS
China won the AI race for global adoption
