Anthropic

Claude for Small Business ships | Altman Testifies He's 'truthful'

15 min
May 13, 202617 days ago
Listen to Episode
Summary

This episode covers Anthropic's launch of Claude for Small Business targeting 36M SMBs, AI chatbots leaking real phone numbers from data brokers, Sam Altman's testimony in the Elon Musk lawsuit with damaging allegations of lying, and Anthropic overtaking OpenAI in paid business AI spending for the first time.

Insights
  • Anthropic grew from 9% to 34.4% paid business adoption in 12 months, capturing 26 percentage points while the overall AI market only grew 9%, indicating significant market share redistribution rather than category growth
  • AI chatbots are surfacing real personal data (phone numbers, addresses) sourced from California data brokers, creating a new privacy tooling market opportunity similar to healthcare compliance solutions
  • On-site power generation for data centers, while controversial, may be preferable to government subsidies that increase electricity costs for local residents, shifting infrastructure burden from taxpayers to companies
  • The Ilya Suskaiver 52-page document detailing Sam Altman's alleged pattern of lying, now public record from trial testimony, represents significant reputational damage regardless of lawsuit outcome
  • Small business AI adoption is accelerating through vertical-specific integrations (QuickBooks, HubSpot, Canva) that automate routine tasks like expense categorization, reducing reliance on professional services
Trends
Enterprise AI vendor consolidation: Anthropic displacing OpenAI as top paid business AI provider based on actual corporate spending dataPrivacy-first AI features emerging as competitive differentiator (Meta's incognito chat, DeleteMe reports driving product development)Data broker supply chain becoming visible liability for AI developers as regulatory scrutiny increasesVertical AI applications for SMBs integrating with existing business software rather than replacing itOn-site renewable and gas power generation becoming infrastructure requirement for hyperscaler data centers due to grid constraintsTrial testimony and public documents creating lasting reputational damage in AI leadership disputesReal-time business spending data from fintech platforms (Ramp, Mercury) replacing analyst estimates as source of truth for AI adoption metricsAI agent automation reducing demand for professional services in accounting and administrative workflows
Topics
Companies
Anthropic
Launched Claude for Small Business targeting 36M SMBs; overtook OpenAI as top paid business AI vendor with 34.4% adop...
OpenAI
Facing lawsuit from Elon Musk; dropped to 32.3% paid business adoption, losing market share to Anthropic; chatbots le...
xAI
Added 19 gas turbines (500+ MW) to Colossus 2 data center; facing NAACP environmental justice lawsuit over air qualit...
Google
Gemini chatbot surfacing real phone numbers and personal data; 20% of DeleteMe complaints related to Gemini data leaks
Meta
Launched incognito chat with end-to-end encryption as privacy-focused response to AI data leakage concerns
DeleteMe
Security firm published report showing 55% of AI data leak complaints from ChatGPT, 20% from Gemini, 15% from Claude
Ramp
Corporate spending platform released May AI Index showing Anthropic surpassed OpenAI in paid business adoption for fi...
QuickBooks
Integrated with Claude for Small Business for automated expense categorization and bookkeeping workflows
HubSpot
Third-party integration partner for Claude for Small Business small business bundle
Canva
Third-party integration partner for Claude for Small Business ad generation capabilities
PayPal
Third-party integration partner for Claude for Small Business payment processing workflows
DocuSign
Third-party integration partner for Claude for Small Business document signing automation
Southern Environmental Law Center
Filed lawsuit against xAI over Colossus 2 data center environmental impacts and gas turbine expansion
NAACP
Filed April lawsuit against xAI alleging disproportionate air quality impacts on communities of color in Mississippi
People
Sam Altman
Testified for 4 hours in Elon Musk lawsuit; cross-examined on credibility using Ilya Suskaiver's 52-page document all...
Elon Musk
Suing OpenAI for $150B damages; testified earlier in trial; seeking conversion back to nonprofit structure
Ilya Suskaiver
Created 52-page document detailing Sam Altman's alleged pattern of lying; attempted to fire Altman in November 2023; ...
Stephen Molo
Cross-examined Sam Altman during trial; presented Ilya Suskaiver's credibility document to challenge Altman's trustwo...
Mark Zuckerberg
Unveiled incognito chat with end-to-end encryption as privacy-focused AI feature response to data leakage concerns
Quotes
"Anthropic is officially passing OpenAI for the top AI model that businesses are paying for"
Host~18:30
"a consistent pattern of lying by Sam Altman"
Ilya Suskaiver (via document cited in trial)~24:00
"I don't think intrinsically having gas fire generators is the end of the world, considering that's how a huge portion of America is powered"
Host~10:00
"I actually was able to tell my accountant who I usually pay to do that, like, hey, look, I mean, keep doing my taxes and a few other things for me. But like for expense categorization, I don't really need that anymore"
Host~32:00
"Anthropic is trying to target this heavily. I mean, personally, I think this is a brilliant move. It's a massive market"
Host~30:00
Full Transcript
I actually have a new vibe coding project that I have been working on for the last few weeks called AI chat daily.com. If you want to get basically an email version of this podcast into your inbox every single day, go subscribe over on AI chat daily.com. And also I'll leave links in the show notes to the stories that I've covered. We also generate articles and write articles with more in-depth details about all of these stories and topics. And so that's all on the website as well. It's basically kind of like TechCrunch and Bloomberg mixed together with an amazing newsletter. So if you want to check it out, it is AIChatDaily.com, linked in the description. Today on the podcast, Anthropic is launching what they're calling Claude for Small Business. They're targeting about 36 million SMBs. We have Gemini and ChatGPT and Claude that are all surfacing real phone numbers. Privacy firms are complaining about this. Sam Altman recently on trial testified and claims that he is truthful, as Elon Musk's lawyer cites Ilya Suskafer's document and is kind of roasting Sam Altman. Anthropic has officially overtaken OpenAI on ramp business spend. I love these reports because, you know, we're getting like the information from an actual company that's tracking how much money businesses are spending. We have XAI that has added 19 new gas turbines at their Colossus 2. There's a bunch of lawsuits around this, but it's just showing how a lot of these data centers are having to power up with the current grid restrictions we have today. In addition, there's a couple interesting headlines I wanted to cover, which is that Sam Altman is testifying and he said that Elon Musk was asking for long-term OpenAI control before they split from him. Also, Mark Zuckerberg has unveiled incognito chat. This is an end-to-end encrypted meta AI mode. Let's kick this off with the XAI story. So XAI has added 19 more gas turbines at their Colossus 2 data center. So remember Colossus 1 is where they're currently, they've now leased that over to Anthropic. Anthropic is using that. Then they have Colossus 2, which is currently the Southern Environmental Law Center is kind of suing them. They had got some emails from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality. and those emails basically showed that between March and May, XAI installed 19 new additional gas turbines at Colossus 2, their data center in Mississippi. That site currently has 46 turbines. That's over 500 megawatts of new gas generation that they've added since mid-March alone. This is what I think a lot of people are, this is what gets in the news a lot anyways. The NAACP filed a lawsuit against XAI in April over air quality and environmental justice concerns, right? The NAACP is not usually concerned about environmental issues and not usually concerned about suing companies for like, you know, how they're generators, right? They're usually trying to protect people of color. And that's kind of what their organization does, right? So this is kind of weird, in my opinion. specifically they're saying that there there are you know in in this area there's a disproportionate amount of people of color that are being affected by the gas powered generators which are giving poor air quality anyways i think it's really weird for the lawsuit to be coming there from the naacp feels very political in a way considering elon musk had ties to the trump administration all of that so for me personally i think that's not great but i mean maybe they have some some grounds right perhaps eight of the 19 new turbines that they just added over there that added more than 200 megawatts they were installed after the lawsuit was first filed so xai is basically saying they like look yeah we see you suing us we going to keep building anyways i think this is interesting um because basically every hyperscaler right now has to face the same choice you can either wait for the grid to upgrade we have you know a massive energy um we have massive energy problems and i think in the recent trump administration they passed a bunch of laws where and they're basically telling um a lot of these data centers look you should build a power generation on site to power your data center. Personally, I actually think that is the right direction because I hate it when one way or another, these data centers get some sort of, you know, some sort of handout from the government, which happens a lot is in the form of subsidies. And what like who's paying for the subsidies, it's the people that live there. So I've seen my electrical prices go up a ton after Arizona gave out, you know, for my my homes in Arizona, after Arizona gave out a bunch of subsidies to data centers and other places. I don't know if that's directly tied or correlated. But when I see subsidies going out and my electric price doubles in four years, I'm not going to be thrilled about it. So with all of that happening, I know like a lot of people throw shade at XAI because they're like, oh, they're gas turbines, yada, yada. But like at the end of the day, I'm really happy that they are generating their own power on site. So at least people's electrical costs don't go up. As far as, you know, creating smog and other things, I would hope that they have some sort of good carbon capture programs. And if they don't, I mean, that's something you should probably litigate or get figured out. But I don't think intrinsically having gas fire generators is the end of the world, considering that's how a huge portion of America is powered. I think people just don't know that. But anyways, at the end of the day, a lot of these hyperscalers are going to have to find solutions for more gigawatts of power. We litigated nuclear to oblivion, and now we're trying to litigate gas. And at the end of the day, like we need electricity from some source and solar and wind is not going to do it for every every place and for every data center. So I hope that we get this problem figured out. OK, next up, we have AI chatbots that are leaking real phone numbers. And this isn't just one chatbot. This is all of them. This is Google. This is OpenAI. And this is Anthropic. There is a company. It's a security firm called DeleteMe. And they basically help people scrub their personal info off of data broker sites. And they published a report basically showing how many people were complaining about their data showing up specifically in AI related chats. So someone's going to go chat, you know, prompt chat GPT and say, what is Jaden Schaefer's phone number? What is his address? And they would get my information back. Of all of the complaints that people have kind of submitted to delete me, 55% are coming from chat GPT, 20% from Gemini and 15% from Claude and then 10% coming from other tools. But I think basically people are asking chatbots, you know, people's addresses, their phone numbers, their, you know, family information, and they're, you know, they're getting actual real responses back. So where is all of that data in particular coming from? It's coming from data brokers in California. 31 of the 578 registered data brokers self-reported that they are selling or sharing consumer data with generative AI developers in the last 12 months. And so basically that's the supply chain of where all this information is getting into the AI models. That data is bought. It's then fed into the models. And the models spit it back out if you know how to prompt it the right way. So I think there's going to be a whole new category born out of this kind of like privacy tooling layer around some of these foundational models. I think people are going to, I mean, just like in healthcare and so many other industries, this is something that is not great. So I think we're going to start seeing a lot of products to help solve this problem. and even if you think about like what zuckerberg is doing you know he just and he just like came out with end encrypted meta ai mode uh a new you know thing called incognito Chat It kind of the same thing but it I guess a different response to this So I think a lot of the market is going to start focusing on making sure that this is not a problem anymore. Okay, next up, Sam Altman just spent four hours on the stand in his trial, Elon Musk versus Sam Altman. And in this whole lawsuit, Elon Musk, I guess for a little bit of context, spent about three days on the stand earlier in the trial. And I felt bad because you kind of had like Elon Musk was the first one on the stand. He got absolutely roasted. And then everyone's like, oh, my gosh, he's toast. Then it feels kind of like a boxing match, right? Now we got Sam Altman on the stand. Now we're going to roast him. Anyways, this goes back and forth. I'm not particularly on anyone's side with all of this, although I do feel like it's kind of shady for, you know, a nonprofit to become a for-profit company. So I guess maybe that's a bit of a bias there. But and it's not even particularly Sam Altman or OpenAI. I just wouldn't want to see that with any company. But regardless, Sam Altman, people are saying, got off relatively light this time. But the cross-examination was super brutal. So Elon Musk's lawyer is Stephen Molo. And he opened up by asking Sam Altman directly whether he was, quote, completely trustworthy. Then Molo pulled out a 52-page document that was compiled by Ilya Suskiver, which is Sam Altman's former co-founder and also the former chief scientist at OpenAI. and this is something that Suscover has described basically as documenting, quote, a consistent pattern of lying by Sam Altman. So the lawyer pulls out this document by his former co-founder and goes through this consistent pattern of lying and every single thing in it. So this is a real document. It's about 52 pages long and it's from Suscover when he tried to fire Sam Altman back in November of 2023 and I guess this document was sort of the justification that Ilya had for trying to make this decision. And of course, you know, Sam Altman came back. Ilya Suskova left. A lot of the founders and co-founders of OpenAI left. There's a lot of drama in all of that. But I think right now, bringing this up, I don't know if it's really going to change much of the verdict of the case. We have, of course, $150 billion Elon Musk is asking for in damages from OpenAI. And he said that he's going to donate those damages back into OpenAI's nonprofit. So he's like, look, pay me $150 billion and then turn it back into a nonprofit. I'll donate the money back to the nonprofit and kick out, you know, kick out Sam Altman. What I don't think is going to happen is I don't think Elon's actually going to get $150 billion. I don't know if it's going to have to convert back to a nonprofit. But regardless, I think the reputational damage of having this Ilya Suskova document, because it's kind of private and to the board when they're firing Sam, but having this read into the record trial, I think that is something that is going to follow Sam Altman for years because now it's, you know, official and public. so that is going to be something Sam Altman is going to be dealing with for a long time. Okay, if you're already a paying customer for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, you know, Sora for video or 11 Labs, I would love for you to check out my startup which is AIbox.ai. I have every single one of the top AI models. There's over 80 of them all in one place and for $8.99 a month, you get access to all of the top models from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok. We have a whole bunch of really cool video models, a bunch of cool image models. We have music generation models. We have 11 labs for audio. It's never having to pay. I mean, it's at least $20 a month for almost any subscription to any AI model. So rather than paying for a few of those for $8.99, you get access to all of it on AIbox.ai. I'll leave a link in the description. This is my own startup. I would love for you to try it out. I hope it saves you a ton of money and just consolidates everything in one place for you All right let get into a couple pieces of anthropic news The first one is that Ramp which is the corporate spending platform they just released their May AI index yesterday And for the first time ever Anthropic is the top vendor for paid business AI There's 34.4% of businesses that in Ramp's sample of businesses that are paying for Anthropic service and of OpenAI, 32.3%. So Anthropic is officially passing OpenAI for the top AI model that businesses are paying for. This is what I think is pretty wild. Twelve months ago, Anthropic was at 9%. So they're going from 9% in one year. They've now added 26 points of paid business adoption. And I think overall, AI spending, the whole market only grew 9%. So they are way up. I don't think they just, you know, took share. I think they basically kind of redrew this whole map. And I actually love these reports coming from a company like Ramp because they basically Ramp processes expense data for over 50,000 client companies. So it's kind of fun when you have someone like this. Mercury also does great reports in this direction, but it's not kind of like an analyst estimate or like a survey. It is, you know, the vendors and it's literally what people are swiping their corporate cards on. So it's basically the cleanest, most legitimate kind of expense tracking that we can get into who's spending money on what. So huge fan of the fact that these reports go out. Okay, the next thing for Anthropic that we have to talk about is that Anthropic has just launched something called Claude for Small Business. It's basically a toggle inside of the Cowork agent platform, and Cowork is the product that basically I use it every single day. I don't even use Claude code, I just use Claude Cowork. It can take control of your computer, it can browse the web for you, it can manage all the files on your computer, it can do tons of workflows, I have automations, I have skills where I teach you how to do something and it can do them every day. So anyways, the small business bundle is now going to add bookkeeping, business insights, add generation, and all this is going to be directly tied into integrations with other third-party software. So for example, QuickBooks, Canva, DocuSign, HubSpot, PayPal, those are some of the apps that I think small businesses actually use every single day. And this is what Anthropik is tying in. Now, what's wild is that the market is about 36 million U.S. small businesses, 44% of U.S. GDP, which is almost half of the private sector workforce. It's all in SMBs. And so Anthropoc is trying to target this heavily. I mean, personally, I think this is a brilliant move. It's a massive market. Making this easier for those customers is a great play. I personally the other day was just using QuickBooks to go through all of my expenses and categorize them inside of using, sorry, I was using Claude Cowork inside of my QuickBooks to categorize all my expenses. And it's really cool because if it didn't know what a specific expense was, it would go to Google, search the name of the company, figure out what they did, go back and then know how to accurately expense that out. And I actually was able to tell my accountant who I usually pay to do that, like, hey, look, I mean, keep doing my taxes and a few other things for me. But like for expense categorization, I don't really need that anymore. I think a lot of small businesses are going to see a lot of really great ways to save money and also great ways to be more productive with a lot of these tools. Anthropic is absolutely going after a great segment. I'm excited to see where they continue to put out new products. This will be phenomenal. Okay, that's the show for today. If you got something out of it, I would absolutely love it. If you dropped a comment over on Apple, on Spotify, if you listen to three episodes, you can leave a review. So if you've listened to three, at least three episodes, leave a review on Spotify. It's the about tab and you can drop some stars. All right. Catch you guys all in the next episode.