I recently asked Claude to help me think through the structure of my next book. I already knew where the weak point was — I just wanted to see what Claude would come up with. I was amazed by its response: Claude didn’t just correctly identify the problem. It suggested how to use an idea from a paper I had published more than a decade ago to fix it. In other words, Claude had discovered something in my own writing that I hadn’t even thought of.

But Claude also took 10 minutes to respond. Ten minutes of GPU clusters drawing enough power for a small apartment, constructing chains of reasoning no human will ever see. All to revise an outline. The result was worth every penny of my $100 monthly subscription. I do this dozens of times a day. I can’t be sure how much money Anthropic is losing on me — but it’s a lot.

Anthropic recently raised $30 billion at a $380 billion valuation. OpenAI, which raised $40 billion in its last fundraising round, is seeking another $100 billion. With users like me, they’re going to need it. Investors see the most important companies in the world. I see the most vulnerable.

My longtime friend and mentor Clayton Christensen spent his career explaining why. Successful companies improve their products faster than most customers require. Their cost structures are built to serve their most demanding users. And then they get eaten from below by cheaper alternatives that serve everyone else. It happened in everything from disk drives to excavators. The best companies didn’t fail because they made mistakes, they failed because they did everything right.

The frontier AI companies are building exactly the kind of cost structure Christensen warned about at a scale he could never have imagined. No companies in the history of capitalism have ever paid their employees like this. Meta has offered AI researchers packages worth $200 million. OpenAI spent $6 billion on stock-based compensation in 2025 alone — nearly half its revenue. For most tech companies preparing to go public, that number is closer to 6%.

The salaries are just the beginning. OpenAI alone has........

© The Japan Times