Anthropic run rate: $67B
Anthropic's revenue run rate grew from ~$60B to $67B even after DeepSeek's shock debut, showing cheap Chinese models have not yet collapsed American lab economics.
Snapshot · This Week in Tech (Audio)
TWiT 1093: California Sober - Kimi K3, Qwen3.8, & China's Open-Weight AI Gambit
Explore episode
Jul 20, 2026
Where this was said
Dean Ball's Thread: Open-Weight AI Is 'AI Communism' and a Dystopian Hellscape
At 51:12 · chapter starts 47:50
Leo Laporte walks through Dean Ball's influential tweet thread, now that Ball has become OpenAI's head of Strategic Futures. Ball's argument has four points: Kimi K3 is genuinely impressive and cannot be explained away by distillation; China allowing its release is strategically surprising; open-weight models deter AI capex by making private investment in frontier models irrational; and an open-weight dominant world is essentially AI communism — state-provided digital infrastructure rather than a market product. Harper Reed takes sharp issue with Ball's framing, calling the 'China is just too stupid to know what it's doing' angle a 'fatal flaw' in most US analyses of China. Leo reads Ball's final warning: at some point these models will be capable enough that a non-living, self-replicating agent escaping from a Chinese lab will be a real concern. Harper responds that US labs haven't been blameless about training data copyright either, and that the real question is how America competes in a game it's not currently playing.
The GLM Revelation: Chinese AI Was 6 Months Behind Claude Code — Now It's Free
Harper Reed used Claude Code back in early 2025 when it was still rough. Today's GLM is at least as good as that version of Claude — and it's effectively free. The only question is how much time separates frontier from open-weight models. If the gap is 6 months and the open-weight version is free, why pay?
DeepSeek V4 at $0.12/M tokens
DeepSeek V4 costs ~$0.12 per million tokens, vs $10+ for Claude Fable, illustrating the dramatic price gap between Chinese open-weight and American closed frontier models.
Open-Weight Models Already Good Enough for Most People — The Frontier Gap Is Closing Fast
For everything except hard-core coding, open-weight models are already good enough. Harper Reed's Toyota Corolla analogy nails it: a Corolla is a completely rational car. It does the thing. You might prefer something else, but 'better' doesn't mean 'worth paying 50x more for.'
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