Co-founder and Chief Compute Officer @AnthropicAI
SF
Joined June 2009
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“Trust and innovation are not in conflict. Safety is how trust is earned. We must build not only the most capable AI, but the most trusted AI, so that this extraordinary technology can realize its enormous promise for the world.”
100%. Great work from @JensenHuang and team
Today, with over 100 industry partners, we introduced the NVIDIA Open Agent Safety Platform, bringing together OpenShell and Sentry.
Artificial intelligence is extraordinary technology that will advance discovery, productivity, security, health, and prosperity for generations to come.
But its full promise can only be realized when people have confidence that AI is being built to be safe and deployed with wisdom and responsibility.
This is bigger than a single product. It's the beginning of an open ecosystem to build the trust layer for safe agent systems.
Together, we are building the foundation of the AI economy.
Trust and innovation are not in conflict. Safety is how trust is earned. We must build not only the most capable AI, but the most trusted AI, so that this extraordinary technology can realize its enormous promise for the world. nvda.ws/4hcoq7m
Sihao loves technology: he’s worked on rocket engines and collects chips/wafers as a hobby.
He’s also one of the best people I know for thinking about where AI's headed. Very glad to have him on the team. Lots to build!
1/ Some personal news: I'll be joining @AnthropicAI as Head of Frontier Compute Strategy to work with @NotTomBrown on our infrastructure expansion, coalition building, and planning for rapid AI progress.
Tom Brown retweeted
Personal update: I'm taking a leave of absence from YC to join Anthropic. I'll be working with @NotTomBrown on the compute team.
Powerful AI has the potential to improve the life of every human on earth and, as we enter the early stages of recursive self-improvement, availability of compute becomes one of the most important issues to solve.
I'm excited to get started 🚀
Tom Brown retweeted
We’ve received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5.
We'll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon.
We’re grateful to our users for their patience, and to everyone who worked with us on redeploying the models.
Excited to see what you all build with Fable
Fable 5 is state-of-the-art on nearly all tested benchmarks, with exceptional performance in software engineering, knowledge work, scientific research, and vision.
The longer and more complex the task, the larger Fable 5’s lead over our other models.
ALT Benchmark table titled Mythos 5 & Fable 5, comparing Claude Mythos 5 and Fable 5 against Claude Mythos Preview, Claude Opus 4.8, GPT 5.5, and Gemini 3.1 Pro.
Tom Brown retweeted
Introducing Claude Opus 4.8: it builds on Opus 4.7 with sharper judgment, more honesty about its own progress, and the ability to work independently for longer than its predecessors.
Available today at the same price.
ALT Benchmark table showing how Claude Opus 4.8 compares to its predecessor and to other models on tests of coding, agentic skills, reasoning, and practical knowledge work tasks.
We’re expanding our partnership with @SpaceX, and will be scaling up on GB200 capacity in Colossus 2 throughout June.
Appreciate @elonmusk and the team helping us find good homes for the Claudes.
Tom Brown retweeted
Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.
Krishna has built the most agi-pilled finance team in the world.
Krishna Rao is the CFO of Anthropic, and this is his first podcast appearance.
He joined the company two years ago when run-rate revenue was about $250M. Today it is $30B. He has helped raise ~$75B and is responsible for the procurement and allocation of compute.
I feel lucky we get to hear what it is like to sit inside a company this consequential at a moment this pivotal.
We discuss:
- The cone of uncertainty
- How he allocates compute across Trainium, TPUs, and GPUs
- What investors misunderstand about model companies
- Why the returns to frontier intelligence keep rising
- Platform vs application and where Anthropic builds its own products
- How Anthropic uses Claude internally
I have asked my closing question about the kindest thing more than 500 times. Krishna's answer is one I have never heard before.
Enjoy!
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
2:38 The Compute Canvas
6:51 The "Cone of Uncertainty"
11:58 Why the Returns to Frontier Intelligence Are So High
16:45 Recursive Self-Improvement
20:20 Scaling Laws
23:30 Sourcing $100 Billion in Compute
28:05 Platform vs. Application Strategy
32:52 Pricing Dynamics
38:48 How Anthropic’s Finance Team Uses Claude
43:24 Raising Capital & Overcoming Investor Skepticism
52:32 Public Perception, Risks, and Government Regulation
57:25 Mythos Release
1:12:33 What Could Derail the AI Revolution?
1:13:47 Biotech and Healthcare
1:15:31 The Kindest Thing
Most finance teams don't even have a quantitative model of recursive self-improvement
A list of surprising and mind-boggling stats from this conversation:
- NDR is over 500% on an annualized basis
- Anthropic's first dollar of revenue came in March of 2023
- Over 90% of code inside Anthropic is written by Claude Code
- The head of tax is the heaviest token user on the finance team
- Run rate revenue went from $9B to $30B in one quarter (reportedly, on pace for $50B by end of next month)
- Cowork is growing faster than Claude Code did at the same point in its life
- Signed two double-digit million-dollar commits in a 20-minute Uber ride to the podcast
- Krishna spends 30-40% of his time on compute decisions
- 9 of the Fortune 10 are customers
- $100B combined commitment of compute
- 30 different product and feature releases in January alone
- A prior model found 22 security vulnerabilities in an open source codebase; Mythos found 250
- The finance team has built a library of over 70 Claude skills specific to finance
- Anthropic raised $75 billion since Krishna joined two years ago
- The day of the Series E first close was the day the DeepSeek news broke
- When Meta and others made huge poaching offers, Anthropic lost two people on the technical side while other labs lost dozens
- All seven co-founders are still at the company
- The company is just over five years old
Tom Brown retweeted
Incredibly proud the xAI team's execution in bringing on an immense amount of compute so quickly & couldn't be more excited for Elon's vision of an abundant future w/ intelligence spreading to the stars
Over the past weeks I've had the pleasure of getting to know the team at Anthropic & share similar vision - I'm happy to announce I'm joining the team there to focus on compute
Onward towards building a future we're all excited about
SpaceXAI will provide @AnthropicAI with access to Colossus 1, one of the world’s largest and fastest-deployed AI supercomputers, to provide additional capacity for Claude → x.ai/news/anthropic-compute-…
Terrestrial datacenters will increasingly be bottlenecked by permitted real estate space. Lots of space in space.
SpaceXAI and @AnthropicAI have also expressed interest in partnering to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity
