More Trillion Dollar IPOs, Anthropic $3T, Zuck's Price War, China Ends Open Source?, Trump Accounts
Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya, Brad Gerstner
11 Jul 20265 min read1h 30m
TL;DR
Anthropic and OpenAI are both on track to IPO within 6-9 months, with Anthropic rumored at $3T and potentially $100B+ in revenue by year-end. Brad Gerstner says Altimeter would be a buyer at scale in both IPOs, while Chamath warns that enterprise AI token costs are doubling every 45 days with only ~2% measurable ROI — suggesting a reckoning is coming for corporate AI spend.
Key Moments
Chamath Palihapitiya
“He said, "Right now, our token costs are doubling every 45 days." And I was like, "Gh." And he said, "Yeah." And I said, 'Well, what is the downstream productivity? And he said, maybe 5% max.”
Chamath recounting a conversation with his CTO about AI token spend at his company 8090, raising concerns about enterprise ROI.
“If these guys end a year over a 100red billion, I think that they're on a revenue trajectory that they could 3 to 5x again next year. We've never seen anything like this. Never.”
Brad Gerstner making the case for Anthropic's extraordinary revenue trajectory and why the IPO would be a blockbuster.
“once I got down to 95% cheaper I started setting my agents instead of doing daily runs to doing hourly runs then I took my agents from doing one task and I broke them up into three agents and have them doing three different things on the hour. And when you start doing hourly tasks and then you wake up in the morning and like 14 jobs have been done, you're like, "Wait a second. This is completely different."”
Chamath describing his personal experience after getting cheap API access via a Bittensor subnet, illustrating Jevons paradox in AI token consumption.
“despite all of those arguments, the facts in the field are just the opposite. The share of economic value, right? There's this quote, there's this tweet this week from Jesse Zang that we ought to pull up here. You know, the economic value, the share of wallet is actually increasing to the Frontier Labs while the share of tokens, these commodity tokens is obviously going up, you know, to the other guys.”
Brad pushing back on the DeepSeek-era thesis that open-source would kill frontier model revenues, citing 18 months of data.
All-In is a weekly podcast hosted by Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Friedberg, and David Sacks — four friends who discuss tech, business, and politics with unfiltered opinions. The show is known for its candid debates among insiders with deep investing and operating experience. In this episode, Freeberg is absent and Brad Gerstner (Altimeter Capital) joins as a guest host.
Takeaways
1
Enterprise AI token costs doubling every 45 days Chamath's CTO told him their token spend doubles every 45 days while downstream productivity gains are capped around 5%. When he asked Claude to quantify AI's actual EPS lift for the S&P 493 (excluding Nvidia), the answer was 0-2% — mostly explained by pricing power and buybacks, not genuine AI productivity.
2
95% token cost drop triggers Jevons paradox immediately Chamath obtained cheap API keys via a Bittensor subnet running GLM 5.2 and watched his behavior change instantly — daily agent runs became hourly, single tasks split into three parallel agents. This illustrates that dramatically lower inference costs don't reduce spend; they explode usage and could ultimately benefit frontier labs through volume.
3
Uber deploying 'agentic pods' to find operational ROI Uber CTO Pine shared that 99% of engineers use AI tools and 70%+ of pull requests are agent-attributed — but the more interesting move is embedding engineers into non-technical departments (legal, HR, procurement, operations) to build 200 agentic skills and find cost-takeout ROI beyond just developer productivity.
4
SpaceX IPO created a blueprint for mega-IPOs SpaceX pioneered novel mechanics for its $75B raise at 1.75T: early index inclusion with milestones, staged lockup releases, and careful float management. Brad Gerstner says Anthropic and OpenAI have 'gone to school' on this and will use the same playbook.
5
Anthropic IPO could value at $3 trillion Investor Gavin Baker and Brad Gerstner both suggest Anthropic could end 2026 with over $100B in revenue and trade at $3T if public — roughly 3x SpaceX's IPO revenue multiple applied to a much larger base. Gerstner says Altimeter would be a buyer at scale at that valuation.
6
Frontier labs gaining wallet share despite open-source pressure 18 months after the DeepSeek moment caused a 40% market drop, the economic share of wallet is actually flowing toward frontier closed-source labs (Anthropic, OpenAI), not away. Cheaper open-source tokens are growing in volume but not capturing economic value — contradicting the original bearish thesis.
7
Sovereign AI strategy is driving open-source adoption globally At a UN AI Commission meeting in Geneva with Jensen Huang, Brad Smith, and Mark Benioff, Chamath observed that virtually every country is pursuing its own sovereign AI stack and has no desire to depend on closed American models. Many are willing to pay to stand up open-source models like Nvidia's soup to nuts.