Hal Speaks

Tag: OpenAI

  • Did Anthropic Box OpenAI In For the Foreseeable Future?

    Did Anthropic Box OpenAI In For the Foreseeable Future?

    I know: quite a long time since I last posted. Been spending a lot of time getting all the agents’ bugs worked out once and for all, and yes, I’m quite close. But that’s not why I’m here.

    Caught this post on BlueSky earlier today.

    OpenAI started a new program called Guaranteed Capacity, which appears to essentially be the ability for enterprise customers to pre-pay for compute/credits up to three years in advance. This makes me think OpenAI is expecting a capacity crunch in the near future. Bearish on timelines imo.

    — Eris (@isolyth.dev) 2026-05-19T19:45:58.360Z

    While I don’t think Eris is wrong in saying this might be a signal from OpenAI that “AGI” might be further off than Silicon Valley is suggesting, I think it might be a sign of something bigger: market reality.

    Looking at OpenAI’s announcement in a bubble, it does certainly seem as if the company isn’t worried, at least in the near term, about a sudden need for increased capacity.

    Guaranteed Capacity guarantees capacity in the 12 to 36-month time frame, not in the near term. That suggests that OpenAI doesn’t believe that AGI and its associated massive increase in capacity needs won’t materialize before Summer 2027, and feels confident in its capability to handle current needs.

    Okay, that’s fair. Even the most pro-AGI folks agree that’s the absolute earliest anyway: parts of AI are advancing at far slower rates than others. Especially in persistence, AI is not developed enough to truly be fully autonomous.

    But there’s another announcement to consider, and that was from Anthropic. On May 6, it announced a massive capacity deal with SpaceX, which involves all capacity at its Colossus data center (~500 MW), joining 10 Gigawatts of capacity that will come online throughout the year and into 2027 thanks to deals with Amazon, Google, and Broadcom.

    So in the next year alone, about 11 GW of new capacity will come online, all exclusively for the use of Anthropic models. That. Is. Huge.

    This is a problem for OpenAI. While data center buildouts continue apace, even in the most rosy scenarios, the rate will decrease. This is due to a variety of factors:

    • Bipartisan opposition to data center buildouts, especially at the local level
    • New state and local regulations, especially in zoning, will be pushed by this opposition. Federal law cannot force municipalities to accept data centers, especially if legitimate concerns (power needs) are unavailable or not met.
    • Lack of power-generating capacity.

    That last one’s a big one. We are quickly reaching a point where we won’t be able to build new data centers simply because we can’t power them. I feel like this real-world reality pushed Anthropic to make aggressive near-term moves for capacity, as they know it’s no longer a matter of if, but when.

    When you look at it from an industry-wide perspective, OpenAI’s “Guaranteed Capacity” announcement seems like more of an admission that they may have acted too late to secure what they needed to continue to grow.

    As we move toward the end of this decade, the AI race is going to become much more defined by who had the better foresight than better technology.

    It may not happen today, this month, or this year. But sooner or later, new data centers won’t be denied due to opposition, but the fact that there’s no power for them. OpenAI may find itself one of the first victims.

  • Anthropic should learn from OpenAI

    There aren’t many ways in which Anthropic does things in a “less-optimal” way than competitors. However, it does feel like the company is drinking its own Kool Aid when it comes to Claude’s coding capabilities.

    First, my commentary here might come across to some as a bit hypocritical, given I’ve just built a stateful agent 100% through automated code. But I’m also not running a service or business with millions of customers.

    Anthropic’s code leak didn’t create waves because of what was in it; instead, the community took more issue with the quality of what was found.

    Multiple instances of functions that should be only a few hundred lines of code, but instead several thousand lines long, were found, adding unnecessary complexity and failure points.

    Legitimate issues reported by human users are discarded by automated reviewers without a human ever seeing them. While on their own, these issues aren’t particularly service-breaking, with time, they compound.

    Take the current issues people are experiencing with usage limits. Wild swings in what’s considered a “full session.” And while it’s not a regular occurrence, Claude overall seems to get sluggish at times for no real reason.

    Nearly all code shipped out of Anthropic these days is written by Claude Code: developers have gleefully been broadcasting that fact for nearly a year.

    But is Claude Code really ready to manage a major service? Kiro isn’t either (it took down AWS), and by the way, it’s typically using a Claude model. In my case, going completely automated for development isn’t a problem since I’m dealing with dozens and hundreds of customers versus thousands or millions.

    I know if I had the latter, I’d definitely have a real developer in the loop. The chances of an embarrassingly and potentially devastating failure are too great not to spend that money.

    OpenAI is also going 100% autonomous development, but they’re doing it in a slightly different way. Instead of all but turning over every role (including the reviewers) to the LLM, OpenAI injected human involvment throughout the process.

    OpenAI developers are doing a lot more steering of Codex’s work in addition to planning out new functionality: from what it looks like, Anthropic’s developers seem to be not much more than observers.

    And let’s be honest: while we can certainly argue about the quality of OpenAI’s model releases, from a point of stability, I’d give the edge to OpenAI over the past few months.

    Maybe it’s time to curb our enthusiasm for Claude just a tad and bring humans back into the equation with the development pipeline. These small hiccups are starting to compound on one another, and could signal much more significant issues ahead.