David Sparks: ‘Apple Should Buy Anthropic (But Likely Won’t)’

There’s also an ideological alignment. Anthropic has taken a principled stance on AI safety and responsible development. Apple has always positioned itself as the company that cares about how technology affects people. Those values aren’t identical, but they rhyme.

Sparks sees alignment, whereas I see entanglement. It’s the not the $380 billion valuation that’s the deal-breaker, it’s the myriad of contracts and programs that Anthropic is involved with. Anthropic said no to the Pentagon. Apple would have rolled over.

@jarrod weird times when Apple is the one with questionable morals.

@jarrod Good point. The time to buy Anthropic was a couple years ago. Also, Apple couldn’t even put up the money to just partner with Anthropic for Apple Intelligence.

@gregmorris Quite sad, tbh.

@manton Yep, if they wanted it, they should have gotten in on the ground floor. Partnering with Google instead was another nail in the coffin.

@gregmorris I think I read somewhere that the $20 month plan for Claude code actually cost anthropic something like $2000 per month. I don’t think any business that is public could sustain that for any meaningful amount of time. I’m not sure Anthropic can sustain that much longer.