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this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2026
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Ed Zitron has a piece out talking about how even if Anthropic and OpenAI are bringing in revenue, most of it is coming from startups in such a way that their revenue will evaporate if the underlying startups crash, especially because the underlying cost of operating remains high (and where improvements in the underlying tech go towards improving performance rather than making operations cheaper).
To me, it's a pretty persuasive argument that failures at any one part of the web of businesses and funds involved (even if completely unrelated to the AI industry) will cause stress on all of them, because they're so interrelated in a web of relationships.
Ed Zitron publishes a lot of pretty biased reporting. Anthropic has been signing enterprise deals left and right this year, why would you willingly put yourself behind?
Obviously startups will be the first to play they can't give up the advantage at any cost. Enterprises move slower but they won't take longer than this year.
The core thesis is sound, though:
Taken together, the whole ecosystem is currently relying on a continued influx of cash from investment: investors taking equity in these companies, lenders/bondholders charging interest on borrowed money, otherwise profitable businesses like Google and Meta steering their other profits into investment into AI.
And so if there's a shock to investment activity, such as if there's a war in Iran causing an energy crisis and a global recession in real economic activity, that might translate into a cash crunch, as the investors pull back right at the time that the customers start defaulting on their payments. And if you remove the middleman startup businesses that pay Anthropic and OpenAI more than they receive from their own customers, the underlying "real customer" demand at the actual unsubsidized prices charged by Anthropic and OpenAI will plummet.
I'm not a tech guy, but I am a business/finance guy, and I'm not seeing where the analysis is wrong. The argument is always that there's a runway to profitability, and they just need to take off before they run out of runway. And we can argue about whether they will or they won't get to takeoff, but if the business is relying on more runway being built because they know for sure they don't currently have enough runway to take off, that's a shaky situation to be in. Even if everyone is clamoring to be their runway-building partner today.
I agree this will lead to a large pullback, but in a world where a shovel has been discovered I can't see anyone going back to digging by their bare hands again.
And that doesn't change if all the investment into future capabilities stops today.
I would think this would to lead to the demise of OpenAI whereas Anthropic will survive due to enterprise contracts.
FYI on Ed Zitron the guy didn't even know what a programming function was a few weeks ago. This is freshmen level CS stuff. You should keep that in mind when reading his LLM takes. He's not an adequate reporter there imo.
If it puts into perspective the growth and why I can't buy into this downfall, this released today by anthropic:
https://www.anthropic.com/news/google-broadcom-partnership-compute
Things are changing very very fast.