Welcome back to This Week in Stratechery!

As a reminder, each week, every Friday, we’re sending out this overview of content in the Stratechery bundle; highlighted links are free for everyone. Additionally, you have complete control over what we send to you. If you don’t want to receive This Week in Stratechery emails (there is no podcast), please uncheck the box in your delivery settings.

On that note, here were a few of our favorites this week.

1. Anthropic Anthropic Anthropic. In the current AI era, it feels like a new company is crowned the winner every few months, and right now Anthropic is wearing the crown. However, a point I make on Sharp Tech is that Anthropic’s exponential growth includes the part of the curve everyone misses: the company has been on this once-barely-visible trajectory for nearly two years now. Now the company has what is undoubtedly the most powerful model in the world, so powerful, in fact, that Anthropic says it can’t release it publicly. There’s reason for cynicism, given Anthropic’s history, but the part of the “Boy Cries Wolf” myth everyone forgets is that the wolf did come in the end. — Ben Thompson
   

2. The New York Times and Another Paradigm Shift. If you’re interested in media, this week’s Stratechery Interview with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien is a fantastic listen. The Times has nailed the internet era better than media company in the world, and they’ve succeeded by making deliberate choices — a paywall before it was cool, a clear point of view, integrated business and editorial strategies — to differentiate themselves from a sea of commoditized content in an era of aggregators and content abundance. That playbook worked wonders for the Times in the previous generation of the internet, and I enjoyed hearing Levien’s thoughts on updating it for an era dominated by AI and video. — Andrew Sharp
   
   
3. The New Yorker Explains Sam Altman. This week’s Sharp Text hit a few different beats, including thoughts on the Strait of Hormuz and a fun bit of E-ZPass history, but I opened with a take on the sprawling Sam Altman profile from the New Yorker. The 16,000 word profile is certainly an exhaustive recital of questions that have been asked about Altman for more than a decade, but better topics went unexplored. It’s frustrating — and representative of too much tech coverage — that so much effort went into what’s effectively a well-written Wikipedia entry, anchored by a predetermined conclusion, and ignoring more dramatic questions than whether Sam Altman is a good person. — AS

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Stratechery Articles and Updates

• OpenAI Buys TBPN, Tech and the Token Tsunami — OpenAI’s purchase of TBPN makes no sense, which may be par for the course for OpenAI. Then, AI is breaking stuff, starting with tech services.
• Anthropic’s New TPU Deal, Anthropic’s Computing Crunch, The Anthropic-Google Alliance — Anthropic needs compute, and Google has the most: it’s a natural partnership, particularly for Google.
• Anthropic’s New Model, The Mythos Wolf, Glasswing and Alignment — Anthropic says its new model is too dangerous to release; there are reasons to be skeptical, but to the extent Anthropic is right, that raises even deeper concerns.
• An Interview with New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien About Betting on Humans With Expertise — An interview with New York Times Company CEO Meredith Kopit Levien about human expertise as a moat against Aggregators and AI.

Sharp Text by Andrew Sharp

• Hormuz, Rushmore and a Sam Altman Story That Missed the Story — On the New Yorker’s profile of Sam Altman, the future in the Middle East, and the power of E-ZPass history.

Dithering with Ben Thompson and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber

• OpenAI Buys TBPN
• Mythos, Altman, New York Times

Asianometry with Jon Yu

• VLIW: The “Impossible” Computer
• Gas Turbine Blades and their Heat-Defying Single-Crystal Superalloys

Sharp China with Andrew Sharp and Sinocism’s Bill Bishop

• A Ceasefire and Reports of PRC Pressure; Another Politburo Investigation; Mythos, DeepSeek, and a Token Crunch

Greatest of All Talk with Andrew Sharp and Ben Golliver

• An Exclusive Hornets-Suns Report and Mail on LeBron, Wemby, the Pistons, ABS in the NBA, Bulls Fandom for Kids
• Malone to Carolina and Karnisovas Out in Chicago, Cooper and Kon Battling to the Finish, A Jokic-Wemby Classic in Denver

Sharp Tech with Andrew Sharp and Ben Thompson

• Mythos and Project Glasswing, The Year of Anthropic Continues Apace, Q&A on the NYT, Altman, De-globalization

This week’s Sharp Tech video is on why OpenAI’s enterprise pivot makes sense.