Monologue: Anthropic's $413bn Burden

A six-minute monologue, two days after the one on Anthropic’s 2025 loss. This one is about what Anthropic has promised to spend. From Reuters’ reporting on the IPO prospectus, Zitron takes the figure of $413 billion in compute contracts and chip leases that cannot be cancelled: $252 billion to Google, Amazon and Microsoft, and $161.2 billion to Broadcom, which makes Google’s TPU chips. Reuters also reported that Broadcom will lend Anthropic $42 billion toward those leases, with the option to convert the debt into shares. Zitron calls it the first dot-com-style vendor financing of this cycle: a supplier lending its customer the money to pay it.

His question is how the bills get paid. Anthropic lost $8 billion on $4.6 billion of revenue in 2025, so not from cash flow. He reckons it would need to borrow $50 billion to $100 billion every year, at 7 to 10% if the rating agencies call it investment grade and 10 to 13% if they do not, which he calls lethal. A rating agency that grants investment grade, he says, should see people jailed. OpenAI wants the same market, and all of it lands on bonds at once. He argues that AI debt is now competing with US Treasuries, pushing yields up and making every later loan dearer.

He ends with two signs that the mood is turning: a claim that Anthropic’s $65 billion run rate was one day’s revenue times 365, and a report that the big Japanese lenders are getting choosier.

Most of the figures match the reporting: the split between the cloud companies and Broadcom, the operating loss, and The Information’s story on SMBC and MUFG. Three things need a note. The Broadcom loan is “up to” $42 billion, and that is about a quarter of the Broadcom bill, not “about a third”. The commitments run into the 2030s, a schedule he does not give. And the run-rate claim traces to a single Substack post that offers no source for it. He also leaves out the larger headline loss of $42 billion, most of it a non-cash accounting charge.