Issue 008

That is an extraordinary figure, though it says little about profit when computing costs run into billions. More telling is the customer count: over 11,900 had spent at least $100,000 each in the preceding year.

For years, the AI boom has been judged on what private companies chose to tell us. Anthropic is about to answer to public shareholders every quarter, and its own filing says it doesn't expect growth like this to continue. Whatever you think of the hype, we're about to see it priced.

The offer reportedly includes people working on Copilot and other AI products. Meanwhile, Microsoft reported $45.2 billion in quarterly capital expenditure, with much of the investment supporting the infrastructure needed to run AI.

Even building AI products does not put a team beyond a cost review. Microsoft is investing heavily in the technology while offering some of the people behind it a way out. That complicates the usual advice to get into AI to protect your career.

Still, the question is useful: how much of a software subscription pays for features, and how much pays for something dependable? Opening a complicated spreadsheet correctly matters more than looking like Excel.

As alternatives get easier to build, software companies will have to work harder to justify the bill. Reliability, support and fitting into the customer's working day are good reasons to pay. Having nowhere else to go is a weaker one.