Big Technology Podcast - AI Revenue Explodes, Dario’s Memo, McDonald's CEO’s Baby Burger Bite

Episode Date: March 6, 2026

Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) OpenAI hits $25 billion ARR, Anthropic hits $19 billion ARR 2) Are ARR numbers trustworthy? 3) OpenAI's insane revenue expectations 4) Did Apple actually play this perfectly? 5) We need a Tim Cook with claw hands Apple ad 6) AI lab IPOs are brewing, what will the S-1s look like? 7) Anthropic's still talking with the Pentagon 8) Dario's internal memo 9) Wait, was this actually marketing for Anthropic? 10) Or was it a real worry about AI-enabled surveillance? 11) McDonald's CEO's unwitting viral moment --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack + Discord? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

AI revenue is exploding as OpenAI and Anthropics businesses skyrocket. Anthropic is continuing to talk to the Pentagon, even as CEO Dario Ammodei writes some choice words and an internal memo. And the McDonald's CEO takes a very cute baby bite of a big burger. That's coming up on a Big Technology Podcast Friday edition right after this. Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch. their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to

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Have it all with B on Disney Plus. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday edition where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. this week we've gotten a peak or actually a big look at the state of the AI business and it is booming we have the numbers we're going to talk about them we'll also bring you the latest in the anthropic pentagon spat some incredible choice words from centrox CEO Dario Amodeh about open AI and the Pentagon itself and then of course we'll bring you the most critical news of the week the state of fast food CEOs taking bites out of of their burgers, how big those bites are and what they mean for the global economy. Guarning us, as always on Friday, is Ron John Roy of margins. Ron John, welcome back. I will admit, I'm going to have a big arch this weekend. I'm going to do it. I'm ready for it.

This is the burger that the CEO of McDonald's held pensively for quite some time before taking a teeny, tiny bite. Yeah. And I'm going to take a giant bite of that big arch. I'm ready for it. after three very serious episodes in a row, we will add some levity for you at the end of the show and talk about not only the bite that the McDonald's CEO took of his burger, but also the Burger King and Wendy CEOs and the madness that ensued. So BurgerGate at the end. But first, let's go to the main course here.

We have some revenue numbers for OpenAI and Anthropic. And we come back to these numbers again and again because they give us a way to look into the... the state of AI adoption and the business and where things are going. And also they just move so fast so quickly that it's important to stay on top of them. So here, this is from the information. Opening eye tops $25 billion in annualized revenue as Anthropic narrows the gap. Opening eye topped top $25 billion in annualized revenue at the end of last month. That's a 17% increase from the $21.4 billion in annualized revenue the company was generating at the end of the

year. Open AI is still generating more revenue than its younger rival Anthropic, though the difference between the arch rivals has been narrowing. Anthropic annualized revenue recently topped 19 billion up nearly three times from the end of last year and up 36% from two weeks ago. So we have basically these two companies who were doing zero in 2022 are now doing $40 billion plus in annualized revenue in 2026. What do you make of the magnitude of this increase? When you look at it on the chart, it actually does resemble a hockey stick. Oh, it does resemble a hockey stick. But I'm going to come out today and say, let's all start talking about annualized revenue, ARR, annualized recurring revenue. Like, if you look at this graph,

and just to confirm, I mean, you had said it's tripled from the end of last. year being 2025, right? Like, we're talking two months of growth. It's tripled, which is insane. Like, I completely agree the magnitude, the scale, it's pure hockey stick. But extrapolating these numbers always times 12, I don't think makes sense because the sheer like gravity of these moves means that like trying to extrapolate it as just a natural curve when in, you know, I mean, even in all of 2025, things grew pretty dramatically, but not at the scale they have in the last two months. We are right in the middle of just a massive gold rush in terms of this kind of token consumption, this API consumption, especially for Anthropic. So I think trying to extrapolate

this out is not the right way to approach this. All right. Let me take the other side. Please. So this is the Anthropic revenue trajectory, if I have it right, $100 million in 2023, a billion in 2024, $9 billion of ARR at the end of 2025. Now they're up to 19. Right. So even if it is just a month, you have them doing more revenue in a month than they did a year and a half ago in the entire year. No, no, no. I agree. I will say the last two months have been absolutely wild. But it's more, it's starting to feel like COVID-era extrapolation of every single business that we talked about, that the whole world is going to move towards, like, remote work only and Zoom is going to be worth.

God knows how much money. Like, I feel those kind of, like trying to actually look at these numbers in that kind of way, everyone just so casually throws out annualized numbers. Again, it's not they're making $19 billion. If you take potentially, I don't know how they're calculating it, whether it's January and February times six, whether it's February times 12, like, Whether it's a week in February times 52. Whether it's a day times 365.

Like, yeah, this would I mean that, that again, there is no, absolutely no doubt in my mind that both of these companies, especially Anthropic, is absolutely taking off. It's more, we've seen this and cursor. There was like some interesting news this week again around their numbers. But like every startup over the last year and a half or so has been making these extrapolations. and like it's very, very difficult to, and they have done an amazing job over the last 12 months, let's say, in terms of actually kind of growing at that kind of, that scale and that speed and that rate of growth rather than just the growth alone. But are we assuming, do you think it's going to continue at that rate for the next 10 months?

So this brings up a really interesting question because the second thing I was planning to bring up today, and I guess we're here now, is what the projections look like. And if you go from that exponential graph that we are talking about, where does it lead? And a lot of the financial activity we've seen around these companies, the fact that Nvidia is going to invest 30 billion in a company like Open AI or 10 billion in a company like Anthropic comes from a belief that not only are these numbers real, but they're going to continue to accelerate. rate not just fast, but exponential. And I think this distinction between fast and exponential is going to be really important as these companies near the public market, as this technology takes off.

We're going to find out whether this is just a fast-growing technology or an exponential growing technology. And the information did have some interesting numbers last week about where OpenAI expects to go from the revenue side. So notably in 2025, this was, the projection was 13 billion. I think they ended up going a little bit higher than that. I think they were close to 20 billion in 2025. They expect to be 30 billion in revenue this year, 62 billion in revenue next year,

113 billion in 2028, 184 billion in 20209, and buckle your seatbelt for this one, 284 billion in 2030. And I saw these numbers and I had to bring them up because, look, I would be the first one to say the revenue has accelerated like crazy and certainly in an exponential way over the past three years. But to go from where we are now to $284 billion in 2030. And by goodness, I'm sure this clip will come out if they actually end up pulling it off. It sounds impossible to me.

And the numbers seem fake. I agree. I mean, I'm going to have to. There's no other way to look at it. The way we talked a lot about this at the beginning of 2025, and to Anthropics credit, they made this incredible, I don't know if we're going to call it a pivot, but they went all in on coding API-driven enterprise business, API-driven business overall. They essentially were seeding the consumer market, and it was a big risk, and it paid off in a big way.

But they're going to have to continue doing this. Those kind of growth rates essentially do assume that they're going to swallow up just massive other parts of the overall digital economy. And now, I mean, certainly like SaaS stock prices, maybe not in the last six days, but over the last two months have reflected that belief in some kind of way. But I don't know. I think like it really, it's, there's a very clear story for it. but the probability, if you're assigning a probability of it happening, I don't think it's like above 50%. I think it's a reasonable probability, but I don't think it's like it would not be the expected outcome in my mind. And I did just ask Claude to take our graph from the information and extrapolate it out. And Claude tells me that Claude will be at between 28 and 32 billion by the end of this year. So. Well, that's small potatoes compared to 2027. I mean, to go from, and maybe it will happen, but to go, this just assumes that the absolute,

it's even beyond the best case scenario. And as that happens, guess what? Costs are going to go up. And the spending, you can control, I guess you can control, right? The spending is much more predictable because you're going to spend it. The question is whether you can turn that predictably into revenue. And notably, these companies will have to do that about. two years in advance.

So Open AI, right, we're in 2026 now. They're already building for the capacity, assuming they're going to meet that $113 billion threshold in 2028, which means the losses are going to be wild. Here, this is from that information story. As revenues climb rising compute costs will weigh on Open AI's bottom line. Last year, the company burned $8 billion in cash. However, the company expects to burn $25 billion this year and $57 billion next year.

About 30 billion more than the total previously predicted. Holy shit. I mean, I think, so, okay, let's take Open AI, because I would actually say Anthropic has a much cleaner business right now and a cleaner line in that direction. If we dig into Open AI, I mean, is it a consumer business? Are they going to realize their enterprise business? Is that device that, did you see the, what's the Airbnb chief digital officer?

Gebia. Gebia. Gebia. Was that a cyclus, right? Yeah. We're in some device. No, no, not where, like had it next to him at a coffee shop. Like maybe all this comes true.

But actually, one thing I wanted to highlight about, like, being very close to the whole world of agentic commerce, they, the information had reporting this week that Open AI is already looking to scale back its efforts or its resource allocation around its shopping efforts. Meanwhile, meta is starting to get into the. a agentic commerce game. And they've like announced that they might even have a web browser that they're going to add some level of kind of commerce. And we've talked about them as the dark horse and all this.

So so the thing to remember is, and that's not even taking into account Google in any of this. So like all these numbers assume almost like lack of competition. Remember open AI that the revenue growth for them, I got to say, from like October to current date is still pretty spectacular. but we've seen where Gemini is making massive inroads into the consumer side of their business. So is subscriptions, $20 or $200 is going to be enough? Like that also assumes almost no competition to actually be able to continue growing like that.

Very interesting. Opening eye scales back its agentic shopping ambitions. Just as Amazon puts $50 billion into the company. Hmm, I bet the two aren't related. I don't know. Because I actually feel they're playing very different games because, like, that is interesting. That is, I kind of like that. I'm not going to say conspiracy theory, but I think like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's, but to me, they're very, very different activities.

Like, because chat GPT is competing against, like, web-based shot, like, regular go-to-a-companies website. That's where they're trying to kind of, like, take over. versus I go to Amazon. I'm not just using it for the website. I'm using it for the entire logistics powerhouse in my two-day and one-day shipping. So I still feel they're a bit different. They could coexist in a very neat way. But also, do you know Amazon was down for like eight hours yesterday?

I did not know that. I was able to successfully buy a book on Amazon yesterday. So barely I missed it. I recognized I was like sitting, I'll admit at work, and I was checking out the person next to me had this cool portable monitor and I was looking it up and it just wouldn't click through and it couldn't load product pages. And the thing that was fascinating to me is like it wasn't actually a major headline. The largest shopping site in the world, one of the largest pieces of internet infrastructure was down for hours yesterday for a lot of the world. And there's some random articles around it. But yeah, just in terms of.

of how frail all of this stuff is right now. There's a lot going on in the tech world, Ronjin. I don't know if you've noticed, but there's some big news stories happening. But one last thing about this Amazon thing, because I think it's worth stopping on for a moment and then continuing on. I think the reason why I brought it up is it goes to this question of, does every website on earth become an input to a chatbot? Or does it become, does it remain a destination? Does it fight back? And notably, yes, Amazon's business is logistics, and all this fulfillment stuff. But where are they making most of their profit on the retail side?

Or shall I say all their profit on the retail side? It's advertising. And that goes away. Even if you're able to do this while one click fulfillment, that's the least profitable part of your business. The profit is in the media. Okay. All right.

I'll give you that. And then if you don't have like full attention capture of the end consumer, that actually could be a pretty large threat to. Amazon. I'll go as far to say if you're Amazon, why even do retail at all if you can't do ads? Yeah. Yeah. Well, to sell it to subsidize your AWS with cash flow and keep investing in Alexa Plus and AWS and whatever else. Well, the retail business is not. The retail business is so low margin that it can't if anything, it's the other way around. The AWS will subsidize it. So if you can't do ads, why run Amazon? So that's to me, I think, some of the strategic thinking that. That's, to me, I think, some of the strategic

thinking there between the company and opening eye. But I could be wrong. I mean, obviously opening eye is going to be the fastest growing company ever. So you probably do want a stake of that if your company with the means to invest. And Amazon certainly had the money to do it. All right. We're in this very interesting moment that we're going to see these sort of big losses, big projections. The rubber's going to meet the road. And it might happen sooner than we think. This is from this week, Jensen Wong said the $30 billion that he, and NVIDIA invested in Open AI might be the last. Why is it because he doesn't trust Sam Altman or is it because, you know,

he doesn't believe in the technology? No. He says the reason for that is because they're going public. He said at the, this is from CNBC. He said during the Morgan Stanley Technology Media and Telecom conference on Wednesday. He also mentioned that Nvidia's $10 billion investment. and Open AI rival Anthropic would likely be the last. What's going to happen when these companies face the public markets?

They release their S1 documents, and their prospectus saying they want to hit the public markets. And they bring Wall Street bankers, these very optimistic projections, while also saying, yeah, we're going to lose $30 billion this year. So I very definitively can say I have absolutely no idea what this is going to look like, because we've never seen anything like this. I mean, being completely clear, like the scale and the numbers of where these companies are, I mean, certainly, I guess age of companies the only kind of metric by which they're like somewhat normal into going thinking about an IPO.

But I think on two levels. One, like the business models have not actually been proven out in any kind of meaningful. The economics of like every single query, no one really understands. Are we going to actually understand it? We should. But I think for me, the more fascinating part of all this is like, why do they need bankers and lawyers? Like I saw some people talking about it. It's like chat GPT or open AIs hired two law firms.

I thought they're getting rid of law firms. I thought like GPT 5.4 is supposed to. to mean financial modeling. Doesn't it make any sense? Write your S-1 with Claude. Like, like, do you, the power move is you go public with no bankers. That's what I want to see. Ronjan, you're going to make a large portion of our audience very happy today. People in the comments have been saying, I miss skeptical Ron John. Certainly. He has returned. You're right. I mean, it's amazing. They're going to hire law firms. Anthropic, by the way, which is saying that, I mean, not saying that software's going away.

And we'll get to actually some of the job stuff from Anthropic, but they're hiring multiple Salesforce administrators for a company that people say software's dead every time they do a blog post. So I think we can we can all take a deep breath and say that this stuff, and this is going to the question, by the way, is it moving fast? Is it moving exponential? Right?

That's the question. I kind of still am on the side of, hey, it's moving fast, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Yeah. I think moving fast, but also to the other point, like, a reminder, I'm skeptical about the economics of these two companies, not of the technology. So like, and that's actually what is exciting for me because, like, to see the numbers, to actually see in a two to 300-page document desk, one with risk factors listed and margins and, like, I mean, no one has any.

real idea. We've seen lots of reporting, but is there a world where they almost don't, they don't divulge everything that typically a company would need to because they don't really need to and then still are able to actually make it out and there's just enough retail energy to kind of keep things going, maybe. Possibly. I mean, there's certainly going to be a lot of retail energy. I mean, right now, if you want to buy Open AI or Anthropic shares, on the private markets, there's a premium to them, understandably so, because people are going to be dying to get a hold of these stocks, even though they're going to come out at trillion-dollar-plus valuations, which is just totally insane. So we'll see. But the other side of it is you're going to

have losses so big, you don't want to end up in like the we work category where you try to pull a community-based EBITA metric and everybody says, you're full of shit. If you're to choose, I mean, this is almost a gimmee question, who comes up with the 2026 equivalent of community adjusted even open AI or Anthropic? Probably open AI. Yeah, I mean, that was an easy one. I mean, the S one for Anthropic is going to be unbelievable. And the risk factors, it's like definitely going to be our strident CEO may write memos that

destroy our ability to do business with certain governments. Which we'll definitely get into, but I would highlight that as a key. risk factor here. Yes. Okay. Last, last bit on spending. Should we talk about Apple? I mean, Apple had some new Macs this week. They're really slick. They're cheap. This is from somebody on X, Josh Kale. Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google are in a spending arms race plowing over

$100 billion per quarter into data centers, while Apple spending is down 19%. Meanwhile, Mac minis are sold out because everyone's buying them to run OpenClaw. Mac studios have a six-week backlog. Someone ran Quinn 3.5 on an iPhone yesterday. The M5 Macs just shipped with 128 gigabytes of unified memory and runs Lama, 70 billion parameter model from anywhere. The company spending the least on AI infrastructure actually became the AI infrastructure. I mean, maybe Apple wins here.

Maybe all of our complaining is for not. I might have to say something nice about Apple. And it's not going to be the MacBook Neo because, come on, it's like, great, you invented a netbook and you kind of completely devalued the entire decades of brand building. But we'll keep that for another conversation. It was like you really feel. But hold on. I do love this point that like the company spending the least on AI infrastructure accidentally became AI infrastructure because it does raise the question over where does all of this computing take? place and live. And it is fascinating the idea. Again, this, I mean, I remember a few years ago

people were talking about like, small models are going to run locally on device. And that's actually going to be how infrastructure gets built out. That throws such a wrench into any of these stories that we've been talking about for the last 30 minutes. Like, that completely destroys those stories. I mean, honestly, like, if you can do, and it's not an unreasonable technical thing, right? It's not like, especially for like day-to-day consumer AI usage, being able to run it locally in a more secure way, especially if there's ever any kind of scandal around Open AI is actually training on all of our data, which, I mean, you know, like Apple coming in, the privacy angle, we got great hard. you can run AI on it. Tim Cook, Siri might still suck and they still might become the AI champions. Exactly.

I was at an event yesterday that Stephanie Link, who's a CNBC contributor and works at High Tower. She ran and a person sitting next to me on the panel I was on had said that he'd spent more in six months on Apple hardware than he had in his life. Now, that's probably a bit of an exaggeration, but the guy is just running multiple open claws and stacking Mac minis. And, you know, I made a joke and then maybe this is actually what's going to happen is that this June in Cupertino, Tim Cook is going to come on stage at WWDC,

and he's going to start with. Agentic AI has always been part of Apple's DNA. We are so excited to release a new generation of Mac minis. I mean, but if you think about, okay, like the crazy part is if Apple does not lean into this, it's insane. Like, actually, now that I'm thinking about it, like, I mean, and again, regular listeners know even though I'm completely locked into the ecosystem, I have very strong thoughts on Apple over the last few years.

But like, if they give up this moment and actually, they have not done any marketing around it, right? Like there's been no active marketing. Totally viral. They released like, like, and we're going to get into my main. CEO of McDonald's in just a little bit. But like every major corporation gets when you have these moments, you own it,

you run with it and they haven't done anything with it. Like they're almost hiding from it. And it's like this like dirty little thing happening to the side. And like versus this is the coolest thing. Apple is actually cool at the hardware level. Yeah. That's kind of shocking now that I'm thinking about it. There's probably two reasons for it.

One of two reasons. One is they realize that open claw is a major privacy liability, and it would certainly not be of them to encourage, you know, people to. I just saw someone reporting from like a privacy meetup at like, sorry, an open claw meetup that nobody trusts that their data is going to be kept safe. And basically, like, you're just exposing yourself if you're using one of these things, even if it's on a separate machine. That might be one.

The other one might just be, you know, pure or incompetence or just slow moving stuff. I think it's slow moving. I think it's, I honestly, I don't think it's, I mean, it's the, yeah, again, like, hero story. They're going to remain privacy champion. OpenClaw does have plenty of risk to actually kind of like make going after that kind of setup. But like, I really think it's just, it came so fast and so unexpected. Probably, I mean, you think organizationally, like, could you imagine like if you were like on the Mac mini marketing team? Like, who's on that over the last?

few years. I mean, there's like a guy in the corner just like, yeah, I got Mac Mini under my portfolio. He's not even just close to look at the, look at the Mac Mini, but he has to market it. That's yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd love for like a recent Apple departee, somebody who used to work there to just come on. Well, we can anonymize your voice or whatever and just talk about the culture. So, John G. Andrea, if you're listening, just give us a call. We can talk about this. All right. And I'll done.

I'm just going to, I'm going to pitch, Tim Cook, pull out your phone, set it up, have your social media team do it, and just put a Mac Mini in both your hands. You don't have to take a bite out of it, but just take this moment. Take this. You could riff off the McDonald's CEO so well here. This moment is calling for you, Tim Cook, right now. Own it, Tim. Own it. You're so right.

Take a bite out of it. Just take a bite out of it. Take a bite out of it. of it. All Apple would need to do is tweet a picture of Tim Book with Claw Hands. And wouldn't that be like the viral marketing moment of 26? This is, it's a layup, guys. It's a layup. Just we're giving it to you. We're going to just run with it. Please, you don't have to fix Siri. Just do this for me. And I'm on board. Sometimes these companies do take our suggestions, by the way. I think this week Anthropic put a prompt that you could copy.

to chat chipit, to export your memory? Like I was saying, memory's not sticky. They built the prompt that we were talking about, and you drop it in chat chippy T. It prints out your memory. You paste the memory in cloud. And then you continue with a bot that knows you well. That was all Alex Cantruits right there.

Taking full credit. Full credit. Full credit. Influency technology podcast will not be denied. No. New model from OpenAI. GPT 5.4 is here. Birch calls it a step toward autonomous agents.

Open AI is launching GPT5.4, they say. The latest version of its AI model that the company says combines advancements in reasoning, coding, and professional work involving spreadsheets, documents, and presentations. It's also Open AI's first model with native computer use capabilities, meaning it can operate a computer on your behalf and complete tasks across different applications. Open AI says the model can write code to operate computers as well as issue keyboard and mouse commands. in response to screenshots. Two quick reactions here for me.

I just did this story about scale AI, saying that the majority of their training has moved to reinforcement learning, where they train models to act in specific environments, like filling out forms, and then they bake those capabilities back into the model's weights. So it seems like we're starting to see this come to fruition. Also, it's clear the chat GPT and open AI,

see Claude Code as real complex. competition and they're trying to catch up. Yeah, I think so. I have to admit like, I know, did you feel this was a big launch? Did you kind of across your feeds in your bones? Did you feel this was like, oh, like a big launch? I think, yeah, this is an important moment for me to reflect on something that I've been meaning to share on the show for a while, which is that we can't really, you know, first

glimpses of models. sometimes don't tell the full story. And we slammed GPT5 and said it was something that just did not live up to expectations. No, I did. You actually called it. And you said it was a big advance. And I said this stinks. And I mourned O3.

Actually, it was a big advance. And so I'm going to hold my assessment for a moment because sometimes it might seem like a small blip and turn out to be massive. Let's recap what happened again. If listeners might recall, I had said tool calling and reasoning for kind of like agentic processes was the big step up with GPT5. Alex, you were just mourning, 4-0 sick of in C. I wasn't a 40 guy. I was an 0-3 guy.

I want to make that clear. I didn't have a relationship with the model. I just liked it to think a lot. Either way. I'll admit it. I'll admit it. Rajan came out and said this is a big deal. Tool use isn't.

important. And I said this model sucks. It turns out it didn't. One thing also that was kind of surprising for me is like, okay, you know, like native computer use interesting already exists. The fact that they even like they basically is like this is going to be a big deal. And you can see the kind of PR machine at work that Bloomberg picks up like big deal in financial services. They basically just did what already clawed in Excel or anything like like the Excel add in and Google sheets that you can use it directly in there, which still why Gemini is not great within the Google workspace environment is ridiculous to me. We've talked about this a number of times. Talking about skills in chat GPT, great. Everyone has been doing this for months now. Like,

I think all of that just kind of underwhelmed me. And this was a pretty big moment for them. Like they, I feel they needed to be a little bit splashier around this. And it just kind of came and went, it felt. Well, I will, I'll hold my reservations, my evaluation on this one until I get deeper into the model, but I just thought it was notable that they came in, that they clearly, given the press and the positioning, are going after Claude Code and certainly they should be. All right. Let's take a break and come back and talk about the latest between Dario and the Anthropic,

sorry, Dario Amodei and Anthropic and their dispute with the Department of, and we'll also talk about this McDonald's burger bite that we probably should have started the show with because it might be the most exciting story of the week. All right, we'll be back right after this. Starting something new isn't just hard. It's terrifying. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will work out. And it can be hard to make that leap of faith. When I started this podcast, I wasn't sure if anyone would listen. Now I know it was the right choice. It also helps when you have a partner like Shopify on your side to help. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of of businesses around the world and 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S.

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for in-demand fields, like software development and information technology. Learn more at aboutamazon.ca. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast Friday edition with Ron John Roy of margins. Okay, so the Anthropic Pentagon story continues to develop. First of all, this is from Bloomberg. The Pentagon notifies Anthropic. It's deemed the firm a supply chain risk.

The Pentagon has formally notified Anthropic that it's determined the company and its products pose a risk to the U.S. supply chain. And that means that basically if you are working with the Department of War, you cannot use Anthropic. It doesn't mean on those projects. It doesn't mean you can't use Anthropic at all. It just means you can't use Anthropic on those projects. Now, Dario has responded and he says, we believe, this is from a memo that he wrote on Thursday. We do not believe that this action is legally sound and we see no choice but to challenge it in court.

So this is where it stands. The Department of War has declared Anthropica supply chain risk. Anthropic is going to fight it. Rajan, just to pick up our conversation from last week where I said, you know, maybe this is all marketing. I've done like a kind of a 360 on this because the punishment clearly made it more serious than a marketing campaign. But then I thought about it and it was like, well, maybe there still are some elements of Anthropic trying to position itself in a way to the public that it thought would be beneficial, but it just blew up in its face. I don't know. I'm still trying to figure out how to think about this of a full weekend.

What's your perspective? It can be both. I think it can definitely be like was the dictator style praise memo or was it a slack message or an official memo? Was a slack message? Slack message like being leaked, like those kind of things. Are they, is it purposeful? It's, it's our decision. say because there's I mean again like I actually talked to multiple people this week I didn't realize like how far it had gotten who were had deleted chatchy pt I didn't realize it was a whole thing but like the deleted chatchy pt in kind of like protest of Sam Maltman and them kind of like playing nice with the department of war so and then obviously Claude shot up the charts the download charts and like there was

still a good deal of kind of marketing positive impact for them. Obviously, if that means like, it still risks the completely, I mean, disrupting the business by if you are a supply chain risk. And again, as you said, it feels like it's becoming more clear. It's only around specific projects leveraging clot. It's not like there's a lot of speculation, you know, like any company that does any kind of work with Anthropic, does that mean they have to do stuff? stop doing that even if it has nothing to do with the government. It seems like everyone's coming around. No,

no. That's not going to be any kind of ramification of this. So I still think it's marketing and good marketing. Right. It's just that, well, I don't think it's good market. It didn't end up. The situation has gotten so bad for Anthropic at this point that I don't see, I don't see it as like, if it was marketing, it backfired. That's how I see it.

Although Claude did hit number one on the ab stores. Did it backfire? We should get to this memo that Dario wrote because I think it's important. So this is the dictator style praise memo that you referenced. First of all, I'll just go with the results. So first of all, we should also note that Open AI stepped in and then effectively took the contract that Anthropic was working on that it couldn't agree with with the DOW. and then explained it as something that was trying to open the door back for Anthropic. Here's what Dario said.

I think this attempted spin gaslighting is not working very well on the general public or the media where people mostly see Open AIs deal with the Department of War as sketchy or suspicious and see us as the heroes. We're number two on the app store now, and then it moved to number one. It is working on some Twitter morons, which doesn't matter. But my main worry is how to make sure it doesn't work on Open AI. employees. So clearly Dario was happy with the way that this was resonating. I mean, why can't it just be also? Maybe, maybe it's both. Maybe it was a way to position themselves in public, right?

Again, remember, they did release their blog post saying they weren't going to go along with the DOW amid the negotiations, which does, you know, kind of have this way of marketing. But maybe it's also this principled stance that like, and this is where Dario also talks about, about surveillance. He says, against surveillance. He says the DOW in this memo. The Department of War does have domestic surveillance authorities that are not of great concern in a pre-AI world, but take on a different meaning in a post-AI world. For example, it's legal the Department of War to buy a bunch of private data on U.S. citizens from vendors who have obtained that data in some legal way, often involving hidden consents to sell the third parties, and then analyze it at scale with

AI to build profiles of citizens, their loyalties, movement patterns, and physical space, and much more. So maybe it's both. I think, do you know, this is going to be a bit, I don't want to say hot takeish, but like, does anyone between these large companies actually already engaging in mass surveillance or the government having access to, I get in a post-AI world, like the ability to pinpoint and target and mine data is definitely different. But, But like, is it really any different than what we've been dealing with for years now? Like, does anyone think, again, like, I don't know, do you see it? This is like a dark thing.

But like, I think there was like a mass shooter in Canada, was it? Where OpenAI had even been reviewing their messages. And it's like, people are sitting around. Like, so first of all, it was kind of nice to realize there is some content moderation, apparently somewhere in these organizations. but like sitting around just reading people's messages that are flagged like I don't know like is there it's interesting to me that suddenly there is this expectation of privacy which is good and I'm happy about but I think the cynic and me kind of gave up on that a long time ago well it's very interesting

you bring that up because I just wrote this story on big technology today uh talking about how and it's based off it as a viral tweet so not exactly a new insight but I thought it was important you know, quote unquote service journalism to put out there, that if you use any of these chatbots, your conversations are opted in for use in training. And the only way to not have them used in these companies' model training is to go into settings and opt out of it. Meaning that, like, if you haven't opted out,

anything you put in there can be used for training. That means your financial documents, your deep emotional connections with 4-0, your medical records. I think that this is important. anything sensitive in these bots, you should probably toggle that setting off. And I mean, just being like, and then have 100% full trust that by hitting that toggle off, that your data is safely and securely managed by these companies that are growing as we've

been talking about at just unprecedented scale. Like it's both. And that have been, and that have also like, I mean, it's certainly more the open AI side, like never exactly been, you know, like cautious or conservative around how they acquire data. So I think like, so it's both assuming that hitting toggle off protects you perfectly, but also agreed having to hit toggle off. There's that Stanford research paper where they were able to actually kind of like directly show how specific like actions went to training in terms of the terms and conditions. So like that's,

it's, yeah, I agree. It's, it's already there. Maybe there's this distinction between that being there for model training and the Department of War using this for like deeper levels of surveillance that you. Okay. Maybe Dario knows what's being inputted into these models. I don't know.

Or the models capabilities being able to be used for deeper levels of surveillance because of all the data that they can make sense of. I don't know. I was going to say now that, okay, maybe I will, the more I think about it, this idea of like pre-AI versus post-AI world, the risks to individuals are significantly greater. Because like in the past, like to be able to now go through petabytes of data and be able to pinpoint individuals that are speaking ill of like individuals in the government leadership or whatever, like now you can actually do that. a lot more easily than you would have been able to before. But again, I just feel like that's probably happening already. And I don't think that's even conspiracy theory.

Like, I don't know. There's large companies that are built around building that infrastructure. I just want to stand on the table and say, if you're putting sensitive information into these bots, do yourself a favor. And even though it's not foolproof, code hit that toggle off. and don't let them train on that data.

That's just my, my PSA. Agreed. Toggle off everybody. Toggle off. All right, so we get to the dictator-style praise before we move to McDonald's. So Tario says about Sam, he says behind the scene,

Sam's been working with the Department of War to sign a contract with them to replace us as the instant, the instant. We are designated as a supply chain risk, but he has to do this in a way that doesn't make it seem like he gave up on the red lines

and he sold out when we wouldn't. The real reasons the Department of War and Trump admin don't like us is that we haven't donated to Trump while OpenAI and Greg have donated a lot. They're talking about Greg Brock. He's talking about Greg Brockman there. We haven't given

dictator-style praise to Trump all Sam has. We have supported AI regulation, which is against their agenda. We told the truth about a number of AI policy issues like job displacement. And we've actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce safety theater for the benefit of employees,

which I absolutely swear to you is what literally everyone at the Department of War Palantir, our political consultants, etc., assume was the problem we were trying to solve. I don't think you'll see a paragraph like that from Dario ever again because he did not expect that to leak. It leaked. It's going to be a change in Anthropics culture. I think Anthropic will become him and Anthropic will become much more closed off. Now that that paragraph has gone out and he's had to apologize for it. It's really not something you see from CEOs. Sometimes CEOs might think things like this.

They certainly don't write them. This kind of leads me to Dario is he's one of one. Like he's a very unique CEO out there. And this is quite a moment for that to leak. Obviously, even though they're still talking with the Pentagon, they got the supply chain risk right after that came out. Was that, so it was a leaked Slack message? Do we have there right? Yes. Okay.

I mean, again, for all this talk about mass surveillance and kind of like these companies not protecting your data or leveraging your data in unexpected ways, it is kind of ironic, I have to say, that in what he is typing into his computer does kind of make its way out into the world. Yeah. But I mean, which also is surprising to me, like in terms of, yeah, I don't know, just what that, I don't know, what do you think that says that someone leaked that within Anthropic?

Well, I noted this because Anthropic does have this like pretty trusting culture. Yeah, that's what I mean. People love Dario. All the founders are still there. No, only a couple people have left to meta. So I do think this is probably a turning point for anthropic culture or maybe not. Weird Dario is going to be much more careful about what he writes in those Slack message. Slack messages. I mean, as a reporter, I'm glad it leaked. You know, it's nice to read what's going on

inside these companies. But it's unfortunate for, I think, anthropic culture that that's out there. Yeah. No, I think it actually is a big deal in terms of like they really, it felt, it feels from the outside and you've been a lot more on the inside and interviewing Dario, like that culturally they were a more trusting kind of like it was the happy place to be versus. other competitors of theirs. So like, yeah, I think it's, I think it's going to be, it's a pretty important moment, I have to say. Yeah, no, I would agree. And, uh, okay, on the Pentagon side, my guess is they still end up coming to an agreement with the Pentagon. That's where I'm, I'm at. I was there last week. I'm there this week. They have the six month, uh, deadline for,

for, uh, Claude to be, uh, removed, but they're still talking. I see, I'm going to, I'm going to say, I think the part that has changed since last week, and I don't know if you read, like, there was the New York Times reporting on, like, I think it was like 135 school children killed in a missile that, like, had specifically targeted. And then, like, already there's a good deal of kind of, you know, like, how do you make that kind of mistake? Especially now as there's, as Claude is taken out Maduro and, like, taking out Kamenei. I'm not even sure how to pronounce it exactly. Like, it's, like, as this war kind of drags on, or I mean, not dry, like, heats up. I feel there will be more ramifications around, like, you are the AI engine that's going to be killing people. I mean, it is. So there is, it's not just going to be a, okay, we'll make nice for now. It's just the easier way out.

Like there's going to be a cost to that. Right. That school was obviously, you know, a mistarget. And we still don't know 100% whether it was the U.S., although it certainly seems like it was. It was a school that was in proximity to an IRGC base. And that target was suggested probably by technology. You would imagine, given how tech enabled they are,

was it Palantir, was it Clod, was it something else? Palantir using Claude? Right. It would more likely be clawed. using, well, Claude on top of Palantir data. Yeah. But either way, I do hope we get an investigation into that. It's obviously, it is a massive, massive tragedy.

And one that, you know, the worst possible scenario for the AI companies would be, and I don't know, for, I mean, if we learn from it, that would be good. But the worst possible scenario here would be that the Department of War or the military became so trusting of the AI that they said, okay, take the shot. Like we were talking about last week, by the way. As I will admit, I took that side that at a certain point, I let the AI take the shot. But yeah, I mean, I think basically, and this is all like so dark and tragic to have to talk about, but like it's real. And I mean, that's where like there is going to be, if you are the face.

And the thing that I think makes this so much more acute for these companies right now is like everyone uses their product. They feel the product. So you can make that very quick mental extrapolation into here's how it could go wrong. It is hallucinated that last week while skiing, it made up a name of a trail when I was asking for recommend. I mean, as stupid as this sounds like, you see that. So like when you read this story and then you read that their technology is being used into like a, like, to make decisions, it's not this crazy theoretical thing for people. And I think that's actually going to like continue and get bigger over the coming weeks and months. Yeah. Oh, man. I had like seven

other stories I wanted to cover this week. One more thing though on this and then we'll move to McDonald's. So Claude, we have some numbers about how Claude has done in in recent weeks, especially after this dust up with the Pentagon. Anthropics had daily sign this from Bloomberg. Anthropics said daily signups have quadrupled. Since the start of the year, on Thursday, Anthropics said more than 1 million people are now signing up every day.

Third-party estimates from data firm, Apptopia, and found Claude downloads were up 220% on Tuesday compared with February 2020. Meanwhile, some users raced to delete JCPT. After OpenAI struck its own deal with the Pentagon, chat GPT uninstalls, jumped nearly 300% on Saturday from the day. Prior still Claude's audience remains a small fraction of the size of chat GPT's

900 million weekly active users. As of February, Claude had less than 4% total daily mobile chatbot users, according to Apopia, while ChatGPT had 42%. I actually, I think it's a mistake that Claude is leaning so hard into the consumer side of it right now. Like I feel that they actually were in app download. consumer usage, I feel they have this like really nice story right now that like hardcore people build big things on Claude like an open claw and Claude code and

like just everything like they've been in like this really attractive place that I don't know to I get to to move right back into the kind of Gemini world of like just brutal battle and competition in terms of consumers downloading app and using it. It's just not, and paying maybe 20 bucks max. I don't know. I feel that might be a mistake that they're actually kind of celebrating and making a big deal about this. Maybe so. And we should talk about hardcore people building big things because one hardcore CEO, Chris Kempasinski from McDonald's built a big thing, the big arch. And then he tried to eat it. It's from the New York Times. When the McDonald's chief executive Chris Kempasinski posted a video of himself eating

lunch last month, it was not the burger he was promoting that drew attention. It was how he was eating it was, shall we say, a lack of gusto. For Mr. Kempasinski, there was no huge bite followed by performative licking of the lips or rubbing of the tummy. I can't believe this is in the New York Times. No, he bit into the burger tentatively, almost primly. And it gave, I cannot, it gave not, I can't wait to devour this delicious fast food item, but rather I am contractually obligated to perform a particular action here, and I am not especially delighted about it. Afterward, he held the burger up for the viewers, revealed a missing nibble and defying what everyone had just seen, he declared that is a big bite for the big arch. So this is a video that he put, I think, on Instagram. You see him say,

I'm so excited to eat this big arch, and he just kind of holds it and looks at it and then takes a tiny little nipple off of it. And this guy is actually being being roasted. And I think, Ranjan, you saw it. And I know you have deep thoughts about what it means for our world today. So please do share them here. I have very deep thoughts about and what this means for our world today. And do you know what? This was the happiest I've been in the past week in terms of like online culture. This made me feel like it was 2011 again. Like this kind of absurd, ridiculous simple, kind of online brew ha ha. And also what I loved, obviously, how this escalated.

And actually, one of the first margins pieces that ever went viral was about the Popeye's chicken sandwich kind of get like the online Twitter beefs and battles from those days. And like, it's just great for me to see this happening again in the fast food world. And like, what I love about this is one, I mean, his background is just like, Austin Consulting Group Consultant, Harvard MBA, like pure. He's skinny. He's too skinny. No, no, he apparently runs in marathons or ultra-marital.

I mean, he's just like the like, he was made in a lab to be CEO of like a multi-multi-billion dollar corporation. This guy was made for it. How did it get set up? Was there initial blowback? Like, was there like some junior, like I always. always can't stop thinking about, is there some like junior social media manager who came up with the idea? And then at what point did they realize this was a win?

Like, and like there was a moment, I guarantee you where he was sat down and he's probably just livid. Like you guys are making a mockery of me. And then someone has to explain to him, actually, sir, in today's world, you can win this. Like you can win. You can own this. We're going to come out with a second video where you're going to talk about like beef notes and talk about the burger like it's a wine tasting. You're going to have your peers from Burger King and Wendy's and even A&W fast food, which I'd forgotten about exists, but does. And they came out with one as well.

Like, you are going to be the talk of the town. This is going to increase sales dramatically. I don't like McDonald's burgers personally at all in the fast food realm. And there's a lot of fast food I do enjoy. I want a big arch. I'm going to go this weekend and get a big arch. I'm sure sales have to have been seeing a major uptick. Like, this is one of the best stories of 2026 so far.

Yeah, the big arch is 1,020 calories, which is nearly the amount of a complete big mac meal, which comes with a soda and fries. This is not for the faint of heart. And you see him holding it in this video. And it's like, I don't think this CEO has seen anything that scared him more. And the comments are amazing.

This is from the New York Post. Man's aura screams kale salad. That's the most unnatural thing I've ever seen. Why does he look scared to bite it? It scares me when you call food product, which is he called it. This is our latest food product. And the most light comment was he definitely doesn't eat McDonald's.

But do you think like, so did you watch the Burger King one and the Wendy's one? Yes. Yes. Do they eat? Actually, does do fast food CEOs need to eat their product? Yes or no. Yes.

Okay. I agree. We're not going to disagree on this one. I agree. It's also, I mean, I am of, I pro fitness. I'm very engaged in it, although to varying degrees. I don't think you can be that skinny and be the McDonald's CEO. It's false advertising.

It annoys me. He certainly does it. He doesn't eat that. stuff. I don't know. Maybe he's running marathon. I actually remember when I like ran the train for New York City Marathon. My favorite part of it was being able to eat whatever the hell I wanted and actually getting fast food a lot more. So maybe this guy's cranking out marathons. Maybe he's a thousand, 20 calories is like he's got to be doing that multiple times. Yeah, he's got to do that multiple times a day. are you if you are to choose between the whopper wendies whatever that was and the big arch what are you

what are you taking that nibble out of neither but i will say that i now know what the big arch is and i got to hand it to you i think you're right i love how how you're right he must have had that realization where like they knew i didn't want to eat it to oh my goodness i am i have made this company. No, no, no, no. He didn't have that realization. This is what I'm so, I love. There were meetings. There were people sitting around. There were Zoom calls and slides made. And there was like, like, where some poor social media manager who's like on the verge of getting fired has to put together a slide showing impression count correlated to sales growth. And like they, this all happened in the last few days. There's no doubt in my mind. And that is my.

favorite part of this story. I have to say McDonald's is down 2.83% on the week. So I think you and I, this is not investment advice, but you and I have just identified a buying opportunity. Because earnings are going to be crazy. Buy the dip.

When Chris is a buy that dip. And take a little nibble. It's not a big time. Not a big are not investment advice, not a big bite. Just take a little nibble of that dip right now. Little nipple. All right, Ron John. Get home safe. Thank you so much for coming on. And great at always. Great at having you as always. All right. See you next week.

All right, everybody. Thank you for listening and watching. We'll have Olivia Moore from Andreessen Horowitz on the show on Wednesday. Looking forward to that. And we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast. Walter's Cluard knows the accountant's dinner all too well. Lukewarm coffee, cold takeout, and endless manual data entry. It's time to change the menu With a tax workflow that actually flows CCHI firm by Walters-Cluwer Is built to help you work smarter,

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