By Ed Zitron
Publication Date: 2026-05-08 14:40:00
In this week’s free newsletter I explained in the simplest terms how bad the circular AI economy is:
Anthropic doesn’t have money to pay big cloud bills because Anthropic companies cost a lot of money, more money than Anthropic makes! So Anthropic only pays cloud bills when OTHERS give it money! Amazon GIVES MONEY to Anthropic to give back to AMAZON which means no profit! And Amazon doesn’t give Anthropic enough money to pay it, so Anthropic has to ask OTHERS for money! This is bad! This means that the business is not stable and the customer is not stable.
This is bad when the customer has the most AI money!
This ALSO means that Anthropic relies on OTHERS to pay AMAZON, which makes AMAZON dependent on RISK CAPITAL for FUTURE REVENUE! Amazon SAYS it has a big business, but a big business dependent on ANTHROPIC, which means a big business dependent on venture capital!
The SAME applies to GOOGLE too! They both say they have a BIG CUSTOMER, but the BIG CUSTOMER MONEY isn’t supported by sales, so the big CUSTOMER actually means “HOW MUCH RISK CAPITAL MONEY…”