Who's paying for tokens and why? (The Anthropic 1000)

The infor­ma­tion that would most clarify the nature of the AI boom right now is: who’s paying for tokens, and why?

Anthropic revealed that a thou­sand com­pa­nies presently pay them more than $1M a year. We can only spec­u­late about what kind of com­pa­nies those are, and what they’re doing with all those sweet sweet tokens. Here are a few possibilities, tagged with how they’d influ­ence my per­sonal assess­ment of the market:

• Many of those cus­tomers are tra­di­tional For­tune 500-ish com­pa­nies, and they have found pro­duc­tive ways to apply tokens to their core busi­ness processes. Very bullish.

• Many are tra­di­tional For­tune 500-ish com­pa­nies using tokens mostly to build, refine, and sup­port soft­ware — even though soft­ware is not their core busi­ness. Somewhat bullish.

• Many of those cus­tomers are AI star­tups using tokens to build and/or power more and dif­ferent AI soft­ware. Bearish.

• Many are AI star­tups reselling tokens to their cus­tomers at a loss. Very bearish.

Basically, if the value is real, and flowing rapidly out into the real economy, that’s a strong signal. If instead we are looking at a mania for tokens sub­si­dized by VC dollars … well, it’s not as strong.

Note that this is mostly orthog­onal to the pro­file of, e.g., coding agent subscribers, though you could ask a sim­ilar question: to what degree are these sub­scrip­tions being used pro­duc­tively for non-AI tasks, and to what degree are they being used speculatively, and mainly — hilariously — for the inven­tion and refine­ment of yet more AI tools?

Somebody’s got to really make some­thing at some point, is all I’m saying!