Inflation Heats Up, Anthropic Investor Day, Tesla Roadster Mania

The market is reacting to Anthropic's investor day numbers, but the AI trade has been declining for a month — CoreWeave is down roughly 50% over that period. The tension is stark: you can grow 45% quarter-on-quarter and still disappoint, because investors had baked in 10x revenue growth every year. Anthropic reported Q3 revenue of $16.8 billion, which they annualized to $67.2 billion — remarkable for a company doing a tenth of that a year ago, but not enough for a market that expected a surprise to the upside.

The Distillation Problem and the Anti-Monopoly Alliance

Anthropic is fighting fires on multiple fronts. Meta has pivoted to using its own model, and there was a leaked threat from a Meta executive suggesting that if they stopped buying from Anthropic, it could mess up their IPO. More concretely, the hosts discuss distillation — where competitors use Anthropic's models to train their own — which represents 5-7% of revenue. David Sachs at Anthropic framed this as a win: they deployed frontier technology to fight it without resorting to banning open source or slowing down. But the hosts note this is "billions of dollars of fraud" against terms of service, and fighting it is a drag on revenue growth. The real question is what happens to the open weights ecosystem if distillation gets shut down effectivel