@Sama is trying to price @AnthropicAI's ipo for them. here's the idea... the anthropic ipo is in october. the valuation rests on two numbers: growth rate to 27/28 revenue and gross margin. @OpenAI is in a position to attack both, and just freed up the capacity to do it. jul 30: openai cuts luna 80% (1/6 to 0.20/1.20) and terra 20% (2.50/15 to 2/12). sol holds at 5/30. aug 18: @sama announces a two week pause on frontier RL. largest planned run on hold, no end date. altman says astra may have crossed the "critical" cyber capability threshold under openai's own preparedness framework. altman says unreleased models show "various degrees of misalignment." aug 19: q2 lands. anthropic $11.6b. openai $6.7b. first time anthropic has ever been ahead. openai's operating loss widens to $12.3b while anthropic prints a small adjusted profit. ignoring face value let's try and connect them. altman told TIME the pause freed two things: researchers and compute. compute that was going into training moves to inference. so the sequence is: price already cut, capacity just freed, competitor eight weeks from a roadshow. flood the volume tiers. absorb the margin hit. accelerate your own token growth into the exact window where anthropic has to disclose theirs. anthropic then holds price and watches the curve flatten in the s-1, or matches and prints worse margins into the prospectus. neither reads well to a public market buyer. the cuts landed on luna and terra, the tiers that decide who wins agentic workload... feels like a land grab. at least very aggressive cac move. Super curious to see where the freed capacity lands. more throughput at the same price in september rather than a new model, and you have your answer. Sources other than reading x https://t.co/iRpqXL6xCX https://t.co/d2nJtaYhR2 https://t.co/hCOdj2YED8 https://t.co/Kc9SwD12sS