Meta has become one of Anthropic's largest customers, at the same time as Mark Zuckerberg has been attacking the company in public. At one point this year, Meta internally projected that it could spend as much as $10 billion a year on Anthropic's models, according to a report by The New York Times, citing two people who declined to be identified discussing private information.

Anthropic estimated in July that its yearly revenue would pass $65 billion. A $10 billion line from a single customer would have been a significant share of that. Five people with knowledge of the two companies told the paper that Meta had become a heavy user of Anthropic's products.

The two companies compete directly, but what has not been reported before is how far their finances are entangled while they do it. Meta already pays Microsoft hundreds of millions a year to rent AI models. Google and Amazon have committed $73 billion to Anthropic while building rival models of their own.

Zuckerberg did not name Anthropic or its chief executive Dario Amodei in his public criticism, but he wrote that leading AI labs were trying to consolidate power while painting a future filled with doom. The line came in a 6,500-word essay published this month. Meta has been running advertisements telling the public it is betting on people, and Zuckerberg has cast unnamed competitors as the ones automating work away.

None of that is visible in the spending, however. Meta has been buying the rival lab's models at scale for most of the year. Meta's engineers began using Claude Code heavily, Anthropic's coding tool, at the start of the year. By April, employees were competing on internal leaderboards to see who could burn the most Anthropic tokens, a practice the industry calls tokenmaxxing.

Meta executives discussed the $10 billion projection around that time, but then token costs climbed and the company removed the leaderboards. In June, Meta told employees it was on track to spend billions on AI use this year, and that it would build a better system to manage that spending.

The IPO in the Background

Meta's leaders know what their spending does to a company heading for a listing. Anthropic is preparing an initial public offering that could value it at $2 trillion, and it may seek to raise as much as $100 billion. Nat Friedman, Meta's head of AI product, has told some employees what follows from that: if Meta uses only its own coding tools or ones from OpenAI, it could lower Anthropic's revenue before the offering.

Meta has released an update to Muse Code, the coding tool it launched in August. Its employees are increasingly using that instead of Anthropic's tools. Microsoft's AI chief said in June that his company wants to eliminate what it pays Anthropic, so the tactic is not Meta's invention.

The money runs both ways, however. In June, Anthropic approached Meta with an offer of its own: it proposed buying up to $10 billion in computing power from Meta's data centers over two years. Neither company has announced a deal.

Este artículo fue escrito con la asistencia de IA.
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