Anthropic has reportedly signed compute contracts totalling $517 billion — an obligation it cannot cover out of revenue, and neither could OpenAI. Bloomberg puts Anthropic's revenue, annualized from its current rate, above $65 billion; OpenAI's stood above $40 billion as of July. The number is remarkable mainly for whose signature is on it. In early 2026 Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei was publicly urging the industry not to scale investment this quickly, and saying that his competitors did not fully understand the risks they were taking. Anthropic is now accelerating its own capacity buildout to catch up with the market.
The positions have swapped almost cleanly. Sam Altman, who runs the company with the smaller revenue figure of the two, is now the one counselling caution, warning of what he called "unsustainable absurdity" among a new generation of cloud compute providers and arguing that technical progress could turn expensive projects launched today into bad investments.
Set the two numbers beside each other and the shape of the commitment is clear enough: $517 billion is roughly eight times Anthropic's annualized revenue, and that revenue figure is itself an extrapolation from a current run rate rather than money already collected. This is not a company spending its earnings. It is a company underwriting a build against revenue it expects to have.
My read is that the reversal tells you less about either executive's convictions than about where each one sat when he spoke. Amodei's warning arrived while Anthropic was behind on capacity; the purchase arrives now that catching up is the stated goal. Altman's caution arrives after OpenAI has done its own contracting. Restraint, in both cases, is advice about what the other side is doing. That does not make either argument wrong — Altman's specific point, that hardware improvement can strand today's expensive commitments, is the correct risk to name — but it does make the warnings poor evidence of restraint.
Notably absent from the reporting is the one thing that would let anyone price this: duration and counterparty. $517 billion spread over a decade across several providers is a different company than $517 billion due over three years to one. Without a term, the number is a headline rather than a liability, and the comparison to annual revenue — the comparison everyone is making, this piece included — is not strictly meaningful. It is telling that the figure has circulated widely anyway.
What both men are now warning about is the risk they have each signed. Altman's version of the danger is the more precise one: the failure mode is not that demand disappears but that the chips get better faster than the contracts run out. Anthropic and OpenAI have both concluded that arriving late to capacity is worse than arriving early to obsolete capacity. That is a judgement about the shape of the next two years, and it has now been made with $517 billion behind it on one side of the ledger alone.