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The Trillion-Dollar Cover-Up: What Washington Knew About Jensen Huang

42m 25s

The Trillion-Dollar Cover-Up: What Washington Knew About Jensen Huang

As the holiday season begins, the focus shifts to festive traditions and treats, with Philadelphia cream cheese highlighted as a staple in classic recipes. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s Scout offers practical tools for families to manage daily routines, from screen time to meal planning. In a separate but equally significant development, a major scandal involving Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and an alleged affair with a Chinese national has ignited national concern over U.S. export controls on advanced AI chips. Evidence suggests that chips were being smuggled through Singapore to China via companies linked to Chinese espionage, directly violating U.S. policy that bans such exports. Despite these violations, the Commerce Department has delayed action, allowing the company MegaSpeed to remain on Nvidia’s list of cloud partners, raising serious questions about policy enforcement, national security, and political influence. Analysts note that AI spending growth has slowed significantly, with token prices falling due to intense competition among U.S. AI firms, including OpenAI and Anthropic. The market is now shifting focus from engineering-heavy use cases to broader enterprise applications like customer service and cybersecurity. While short-term revenue growth at Anthropic may still be strong, long-term success hinges on expanding adoption beyond tech sectors and demonstrating commercial value in non-technical fields. Investors face uncertainty as AI’s growth appears to be plateauing, and the future of the sector depends on innovation and diversification.

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As soon as autumn rolls around and you swap your iced lattes for pumpkin spice, that's your signal to start thinking about the holidays. The decor, the gifts, the shopping lists, but more importantly, the holiday treats. Cheesecakes, cookies, is there anything better? And when the recipe calls for cream cheese, there's only one option, Philadelphia, the original cream cheese, made with fresh milk and real cream. This holiday season, whether you're going all out or keeping it simple, make it really filly good, find your favorite holiday recipe at creamcheese.com. That's where Yahoo's Scout can help. It can help you figure out things like how much screen time is too much or what's a good family-friendly activity that doesn't require a reservation weeks and advance. And it can help ease your dinner routine by helping you find meals that work for both the training table and your toddler's plate. Because when you're already managing everything else, Yahoo's Scout can help make finding the answers one less thing to worry about. Go to scout.com to start exploring today. Support for the show comes from Plod, the AI-powered note-taking device built for real-world conversations. Whether you're meeting in person or online, Plod can help you capture the conversations that matter. Instead of interrupting the conversation to open an app or manually type notes, Plod is designed to be simple and ready when you need it. With just one tap, you can start capturing a conversation, no app to open, no complicated setup, and no need to stop what you're doing. For a limited time, listeners can get 22% off Plod with code PropGMarkets at Plod.ai/PropGMarkets. Spelled, PL-A-U-D dot AI/PropGMarkets. Welcome to PropGMarkets. I'm Ed Elson. It is November 12th. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The major indices climbed with tech leading the rally. The AI trade got a boost from core weaves earnings, which managed to calm investor anxieties for now. The stock popped 24%, meanwhile the dollar climbed again towards its highest level since April 2025, as traders solidified bets on a rate hike. And finally, Nvidia shares rose 3%, amid news that Jensen Huang has been back at work all week, reportedly trying to project business as usual. And breaking news, I am recording this from home after production wrapped. The New York Times has just reported that Jensen Huang had another affair with a direct report within Nvidia, and according to the Wall Street Journal, the board is preparing to oust him, the stock is plummeting in after hours trading. Okay. What's happening? The Nvidia spy scandal is threatening to complicate US-China relations. For more than a year, US authorities have been investigating mega-speed international, a Singapore-based Nvidia customer, official suspect mega-speed of helping Chinese firms get around US export controls on advanced AI chips, and Alice Huang, the suspected Chinese spy who had an affair with Jensen Huang, is a former executive of the company. And on Monday, the New York Times reported that commerce undersecretary Kessler halted an investigation into mega-speed after Nvidia intervened, and the financial times has reported that the commerce department is delaying blacklisting mega-speed despite pressure from several other agencies. These revelations come as President Trump prepares to meet Xi Jinping in China next week. The scandal is now raising a much bigger question, can America keep its most advanced tech out of China's hands? Joining us to discuss this, we're speaking with Chris McGuire, senior fellow for China and emerging technologies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Chris, incredible week, incredible news that we're seeing here. There are a lot of places that we could begin, but I think it would be helpful to just get a refresher on what our export policy on chips with China actually is and how it's changed, because the hot of the issue here isn't really that Jensen Huang hadn't affair with someone. The problem is that he hadn't affair with someone who was allegedly smuggling GPU chips from Singapore into China and the question is whether he actually knew about this. But just remind us, what is our policy right now and how has it changed? The policy broadly is that advanced chips, really any AI chips require a license to go to either China or to any China headquartered company anywhere in the world. The anywhere in the world bit has been the case since 2023, and the purpose is to prevent say subsidiaries of Chinese companies that are located outside of China from receiving the chips. But this means is for a US company, if there's a foreign company and you know that they are a Chinese company, then you can't send chips to them. So obviously if they're officially a subsidiary of a China headquartered company, then you can't send chips to them. But even also if you know that they are a Chinese cutout, you also can't send chips to them. Now I think there's valid questions about if this is sufficient, because what this does is it basically makes it less the private sector due to the determination of what is a Chinese company and what is not. But the concern here is that this company mega speed very clearly was and is a Chinese company. It's it's being led by Chinese spies. Those spies are trying to buy these AI chips. They are infiltrating Nvidia and the chips are still flowing to them. So from a policy perspective then, the question is why has this company not been cut off? Yeah. We'll get to that and why isn't the government really investigating into this. But let's assume that that Jensen Huang kind of knew what was going on, that's sort of my position on this. I don't see how he could have had such an intimate and close relationship with someone with Alice Huang and not known that she at least had some connection to the Chinese government. She was a reporter of a Chinese state media. He clearly spent a lot of time with her. Hopefully Nvidia executives went over to look at a lot of the these companies that had been buying these chips and they found that actually none of the chips were there and so they probably could have connected the dots and realized, okay, probably these things are getting sent over to China. So in terms of a government policy, how bad of a breach of policy is that because it's about national security and I guess he broke the law if he knew, I mean, how bad is that? What is the punishment? What is the remedy for doing something like that? Well, with the caveat at first that obviously this is a legal question and people have to make a determination of what people knew and I'm not making any accusations on that front. But if you know that a company is a Chinese company or if you know that a company is engaged in export control violations, then exporting to that company is a felony. So that and very, very clearly, right? You are, that is as if you are exporting the chips directly to China. Now to be clear, I don't know what people knew and it's also fair that like knowledge standards are fairly, this is a kind of squishy thing. So actually proving that you had the knowledge is something that's fairly hard. But and this is why maybe this is something that we should have actual more government oversight and let's just kind of outsourcing it and then just hoping people comply with the knowledge standard. But from just from a perspective of what legal and what's not, if there was actual knowledge that people can prove, that would be a crime. Like I said, no idea if that's the case or not. But obviously like, we are in a situation where those are questions that I think people have to ask on the government side and I think also in the internal independent investigation into Nvidia side. So it's a crime in and of itself and then I sort of layer on top of it, this national security element, this idea that we are, I mean based on our policy in some sort of arms race with China when it comes to AI and there have been so many concerns about about what that might look like and what the implications of that might be. I mean, are we getting into like treason territory, is this, is that going to be a question that is going to be in the minds of legislators and policy makers like, is that what's at stake here? I would be skeptical that that's kind of what we're talking about. But the real question here is, is was there sufficient compliance with controls, right? There are clear laws and rules and regulations of what companies can or cannot do. And if that is violated, then that is a big problem. I mean, yes, I think there's separate concerns of, you know, interactions with a Chinese spy. What does that mean? I would, I would say is like in all likelihood, I don't doubt that that Jensen. didn't know that she was a Chinese spy. You never know, but even if you knew that there was a Chinese, she was a Chinese national and that she had ties to China, Megaspeed had ties to China. That would be a different situation. That itself is a problem. But the way that these espionage cases would typically work is they don't want you to know that they're a spy. That the spy is trying to extract information from you. They're probably trying to figure out who has computing power. They're probably trying to influence Jensen to give more to Megaspeed, because Jensen's very much the decider on this front, given there's so much more demand than there is supply for chips. So Nvidia decides who gets chips. They want them to go this way. There probably are some subtle communications of like, "Hey, shouldn't the US and China cooperate?" Shouldn't we really work together on AI safety? I mean, I don't know, but that is typically what an espionage campaign would do. Obviously, then there's valid questions of Nvidia has been very vocal in terms of their positions on export controls and being prosendingships to China. And then the question is why, and was this something that was influenced by Chinese spies? I don't know, and we won't know, but I think now all of this is open for questioning, and when you talk about what are Nvidia's positions on export controls in China and why, they just obviously have no credibility at this point. - So the other piece of this is the fact that a lot of government officials knew about this. The Commerce Secretary apparently stopped an investigation into this company. We're now learning that the Commerce Department is delaying, putting mega speed on the blacklist, which is surprising because they've been pretty willing and able to blacklist a lot of other companies. And then Alexios also reported that intelligence officials pressed Howard Lucknick to take action against this company since the fall of last year. And so it's just kind of remarkable that no action was taken until this was sort of broken out into the public sphere. I mean, what are we to make of that? What does that say about this White House and I guess the extent to which they view this as an actual problem? - There is no real justification for why, once the Commerce Department is aware that you have a company that is being run by Chinese spies, that is buying large numbers of AI chips and the US policy is AI chips don't go to Chinese companies. That company needs to be cut off. That's the whole point of the policies. So I really cannot imagine the rationale for why they should not be cut off. And it's really stunning that today, they still can receive chips. There's no restrictions. They're still listed on Nvidia's cloud, on Nvidia's website as a cloud partner of Nvidia. It's just unbelievable here. And obviously you're seeing the administration, other members of the administration, Secretary Besen today, which has been reported multiple times, are pushing the Commerce Department to take action here and they're not. And I think you're right that the Commerce Department in the past has been willing to blacklist entities, but it's also worth noting that actually recently, and by recently, I mean, for most of this administration, they have not. It's actually, we are in the longest period between entity listings, between black listings of companies in the last many, many years for commerce. Certainly going back decades. This is a tool that they have just refused to use. And on top of that, what I'd say is there are actually regulations on the books right now that would the Biden administration put in place in January 2025, that in May 2025, the Trump administration said they were not going to enforce. But if they were enforcing those regulations, they would prevent untrusted companies in Malaysia, in Singapore, in a bunch of other countries around the world that are not close allies. If it's an untrusted company, they can't receive billions of dollars of AI chips without a license, which to me is a very rational policy. Like we obviously want companies like Amazon and Microsoft and generally trusted allied companies to be building these data centers. But if you have a company that just pops up out of nowhere and is like, hey, I want $5 billion worth of chips, maybe the US government should have a say into whether we should or not. And we have no visibility into this because the Commerce Department is not enforcing these policies. So I think very clearly we need to be asking why if there's not a good answer. And at the minimum, they should be enforcing the regulations that are already on the books that would actually prevent in this situation in the first place. - I think a lot of people, you asked the question, why? Why didn't they investigate this? Or I guess they did. And then why didn't they take any action? Why did they, in some cases, halt the examination and the investigation while their own export policy was literally designed to prevent something like this. There was a policy to stop chips going to China. They learned that the chips are going to China by via some smuggled route through Singapore and Jensen Huang and his relationship with this woman, which they knew about, which the president had been briefed on. Why would they not do anything about it? I think a lot of people will think because he's a friend of Jensen Huang. We know that they have a close relationship. We know that they speak to each other on the phone a lot. We know that the president respects Jensen Huang and feels that Nvidia is an important part of the American economy, which it is. And so maybe this is sort of a result of cronism, resulting in making exceptions for people. I mean, is that what we are to make a bit? And if not, why not? - I agree that there is something weird going on. And what is interesting, though, is the fact that you have this reporting that says the Treasury Department is asking the Commerce Department to take action. The White House is actually pushing the hill to pass bills that make export controls stronger. So it seems like you have the White House is pushing for stronger policies. You have the Treasury Department which is generally leading China policy pushing for stronger policies. So while I don't know what the president has personally said on this, the rest of the indications from the administration actually seem to be that they're moving in one direction and commerce is moving in the other. So for me, I would look into commerce. What are the ties there? Why is commerce defending Jensen? And that, I think, is a question that I think investigators need to look into. I think in particular, are there ties between Cantorface Gerald and Nvidia that need to be examined, given Secretary Lutnik? You know, why did Undersecretary Kessler intervene in an, like you said, in an ongoing investigation into mega speed and by proxy and video and alert Nvidia about that investigation? I think something real to remember is that the Commerce Department is actually a law enforcement agency. They have people with guns and badges and who can arrest people for export control violations. So for a law enforcement official to tell a company that they're being investigated or that their closest business partner is being investigated. Like the FBI would never do that, but that's what's happening here. So I think there's a host of questions that not only are resulting in extremely bad policies, but also like, I think we have to reasonably wonder, you know, is someone benefiting from this? Is someone profiting from this? 'Cause I just, I cannot come off with a better explanation for why you would continue to let all these chips flow. And I should also just say mega speed is undoubtedly the tip of the iceberg. There's undoubtedly a slew of additional mega speeds that are also receiving all these chips. Well, say more about that because that's gonna be so crucial for investors, especially because if we learn that there are, I mean, we know that Nvidia gets a significant amount of its revenue from non-China Asian companies. And if this is another example of, you know, I mean, if this is the tip of the iceberg and we could be looking at significant amounts of Nvidia revenue, which is going to be, I guess, voided, shut off. Maybe that they're gonna be punished for. I mean, say more about why you believe that there is more to this story. - Yeah, so there's a few different elements of this. And ultimately, I do think it's a tip of the iceberg on the smuggling. I'm actually less concerned about impacts on Nvidia sales over longer-term, I'll explain why. I think that the, you know, if you look at some of the trade data, there have been $80 billion of AI chips that this year that went to Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia. They actually were the number two, three, or two, four, and five, importer of AI chips in the world behind the United States. But half the AI chips that don't go to the United States goes to those three countries. And these are countries that don't have robust AI industries. Now, obviously, there are many data centers. And then some of those data centers are run by US companies, but there's also a lot of data centers that are run by companies that are not, that are, you know, the cloud providers that are providing all of this compute to China. So I do think that that has to be looked into, because this is very obviously, you know, export control circumvention by China to, you know, gain access to the chips that they can't buy. But keep in mind that everyone in the US and every US company wants as many of these chips as they can. And this is the really curious thing for why Nvidia is so adamant about selling to China and selling to Southeast Asia, because you have also Elon Musk and Andy Jassy out there saying, hey, we can't get enough chips. We want more chips. We, you know, Jensen is repeatedly saying, you know, all our products are sold out, everything's sold out in the cloud. There is, there's way more demand. So if there's, if we're not selling to mega speed, those chips are probably going to get bought by SpaceX, by Meta, by Google, by Amazon, by Microsoft. And now, obviously, you know, there is some limit on demand, but what we're seeing generally is that the demand for chips and data centers and AI compute is voracious. And the export control is so far, I would argue, have cost Nvidia exactly zero sales. Every single chip they have made since their chips started to be controlled has actually still been bought. They're, they don't have excess supply. So we, We still have room to kind of move things away from China or from Chinese cutouts, and two US firms and two Allied firms, and everybody benefits from that. Obviously, there's going to be big fallout for Nvidia generally and their stock about this whole investigation. But I do think that there's demands like they are from US companies that they could take up if we actually cut some of these flows to the Chinese cutouts off. Looking ahead to what might happen next, we're seeing on Cal State, 20% of traders think that Jensen Huang will be out before the end of the year. What do you think happens next year? Do you think Jensen Huang stays, does he resign? What's the next chapter? I'll leave that to Nvidia to do that internal decision analysis and investigation and decision. They have hired a very serious and professional firm to do the kind of internal oversight, which is good. I imagine that there is going to be substantial congressional oversight into this, both into the Nvidia side and into the Department of Commerce and policy side of this, we'll see where that ends up. Look, I agree with everybody who says that Nvidia and Jensen in particular has done amazing things for this company. He has built the company that makes the best products in the world. They make it better than anyone. They have incredible chip design capabilities, supply chain operations. I think it's also very clear that he executed extremely poor judgment in this case and has put in a U.S. national security at risk and is completely up to the investigators to determine what that means for the fate of the company, but no matter what happens, he obviously has been an incredible CEO from a company building perspective. I just think from a efficacy and Washington perspective and the policy approach they've taken, that is now, I think, has very little credibility and they'll have to decide what that means for shareholders going forward. As McGuire is seeing a fellow for China and emerging technologies at the Council on Foreign Relations, Chris, appreciate your time. Thanks for having me. After the break, AI spending growth starts to slow and for even more markets insights you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter, simply put at edridelson.substac.com. Bonus used to mean raising money, hiring a team, finding developers and spending years just getting the idea off the ground. With Base 44, starting something new has never been simpler. It's an AI platform where you describe the software you need and it delivers. Base 44 goes beyond standard prototyping by converting your vision into fully functional software. It lays out the pages, the data, who uses it, and what the tools should remember. 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Alpha Space is an investment charting and analysis platform featuring a fully customized world dashboard, bringing together the market data, trends, and insights most relevant to your portfolio and investment strategy. You can explore Alpha Space with a Yahoo Finance Gold subscription, and right now your first year is 50% off. Head to YahooFinance.com/vox. That's YahooFinance.com/vox. Build is $239.70 for the first year, then $479.40 thereafter. For Valid for new subscribers in the US, offer ends December 31, 2026. Support for the show comes from Komatier. Komatier sources call fee from the best roasters in the world, like Intelligencia, brews it to perfection, and then flash freezes it at -321 degrees Fahrenheit with liquid nitrogen to lock in peak flavor and freshness. It comes on dry ice right to your door in recyclable aluminum capsules, all you have to do is melt it to make hot coffee, iced coffee, or espresso-style drinks like lattes in seconds. No machine or plastic brew pot required. The tech behind Komatier was developed by MIT-trained engineers and leading coffee experts. Our producer, Alison Weiss, has tried Komatier and she says it has made her mornings a lot easier, she used to spend time making coffee that never quite tasted the way she wanted. Now she can make a cup in just a few seconds and it actually tastes like something she would get at her favorite coffee shop. Try it for yourself, and for the listeners of this show, you can get $20 off at Komatier.com/ProfG or use code ProfG, that's spelled C-O-M-E-T-E-E-R dot com/ProfG or use code ProfG. We're back with ProfG markets. We are days away from one of the most anticipated events in AI, the Anthropic IPO. Before the trading begins, investors are still trying to get a sense of what the future of Anthropics business will actually look like. New data from RAMP's AI index, which distills transaction data from more than 85,000 American businesses, may do just that. RAMP economists found that in October, overall AI spend grew less than 2% month over month. Meanwhile, open AI's token spend growth fell to 2.1%, and Anthropics fell to 0.5%. The AI index also shows that overall token spend has been roughly flat since August, and despite the fact that businesses were using about 30% more tokens in October than they were the month before, they spent only about 10% more to purchase those tokens, which suggests that AI pricing is collapsing. So, what are Anthropics customers telling investors ahead of next week? Hit a break this down. We are speaking with Aura Karazian, Lead Economist at RAMP. Aura, thank you for joining us. Let's dig into your recently published work here on AI from the RAMP AI index. I think the thing that really stands out to me is just the overall AI spend month over month, 2% growth, which is just significantly lower than what we've seen in previous months when you've been tracking this. Tell us a little bit about what we saw in terms of token spending and what it says about the AI business at the moment. Thanks, Adam. Let's talk about the importance of tracking these kinds of spend trends from OpenAI and Anthropic. The main finding over the last year is that AI spend had been rising pretty rapidly between OpenAI and Anthropic. We saw a double-digit growth month over month from most of 2026, and that started to slow down over the last couple of months, now down into the single digits for both OpenAI and Anthropic. It's important to note that it's not a demand issue and that firms are using more AI by pretty much any measure. They're using more models. They're spreading their spend across multiple models. They're using more tokens, but it's that those tokens have come down so significantly in price because of this price war that their actual spend has remained relatively flat. Now, that's opening a lot of new questions for OpenAI and Anthropic. The main one being, where do we go from here? On my post-it outline, some of what I thought were new fronts in the AI trade and ways in which they would have to start competing with each other that they didn't necessarily have to a year before. That's because there's now new demand from businesses for cost-effective and faster models to support other enterprise use cases outside of coding. Just looking at the data that you found on the average price per token. For OpenAI and Anthropic, token prices fell almost 15% last month. The average price per million tokens on Anthropic is $0.55, opening out it's $0.50. Is this a story of open-weight models, presumably mostly from China, flooding the market and forcing OpenAI and Anthropic to reduce prices? What is going on? What is lowering prices as precipitously as we're seeing? I wouldn't even blame it on the Chinese models, not that they don't matter, but in our dataset, Chinese models have less than 5% of the market as far as business spend goes. I honestly think that if you were to ban all the Chinese models tomorrow, you would still see this kind of price competition from OpenAI and Anthropic just on their own. In addition to the emergence of new American AI labs that are starting to compete with them, and also have the advantage of maybe having access to better compute that will then allow them to build better frontier models. Space X AI is a really good example of that. Both has, in its hands, a highly performant model, popular with engineering teams, growing in market share, and also has this compute advantage in that they own so many chimps that can rent them out to Anthropic that once OpenAI and Anthropic get into some funding crunch and maybe can't invest as much into compute and building new frontier models, who's going to have the advantage there, it's going to be exactly the model companies that already have access to compute. Today, it's going to be SpaceX AI, that's going to be meta. They're not big players in terms of AI spend today by businesses, but you can imagine that they're likely going to go down that road. They're going to expand their market share there. And what is today, two-way race between open-line and anthropic is very quickly going to become a four-way race between them and SpaceX AI, meta, maybe some other players. That's only going to accelerate the kind of competition in these effects that we've seen so far that have driven down the price of AI. Just looking at anthropics specifically, lastly, you said that their Q4 business spend is on track to increase between 15% and 25% quarter over quarter. And just for context, the previous quarter, we learned that their revenue grew 47%. And I believe that before we learned that number, you had put out an estimate for their Q3 revenue growth, which was pretty much in line with that. I believe you had predicted it would be 50%. By the way, that was a lot lower than investors wanted, because they were looking at nearly 150% growth the quarter before that. So it appears that growth is slowing. You see it coming in between 15% and 25% next quarter. Is that still the case based on what you're seeing in terms of spending? Well, it's a sign of how volatile and dynamic AI spend really is between businesses and that billions of dollars in market share can shift between one company and another within a matter of weeks, not months. That's in large part because new frontier models introduced by one company will then suck up the demand that is coming from another. It's also one of the funny things about how the model companies have been reporting ARR in that it is their recurring revenue annualized, but it's hard to think of any of the spend as recurring when businesses can so easily move it from one provider to another and are already finding ways to cut their spend and control it. So it's going to be a big challenge for model companies. We've been tracking it for a while. I think the IPOs will be at least a good thing for the markets in terms of allowing us to see some more data on the cost structure of these model companies. It's one of the great challenges of investing in this kind of market and understanding it as a market participant is how volatile it is. We haven't seen something like this before. It seems when I look at your data, when I look at the charts that you guys have published. And to be clear, this isn't the exact numbers. We're looking, you guys have proprietary access to what businesses are spending, but so we don't know exactly what the numbers will look like when we see the numbers for Q4 and then of course going into 2027, but it looks as though AI revenue is starting to plateau or AI revenue growth is starting to plateau. Do you think that is the right characterization of what is happening here? Do you think that is something that executives at a thromping and open AI are beginning to contend with? Is that the takeaway? I think the largest segment of spend in terms of enterprise spend on AI, which is engineering use, is starting to plateau because those are precisely the teams that are incentivized now to figure out how to spend on AI more efficiently. That's by and large what we hear from our customers on the platform too. Does that mean AI spend itself is going to flatline forever? Well, it depends on what the model companies are able to do in terms of their ability to innovate into a new commercially advanced version of AI that drives productivity gains for teams outside of the engineering use case. Now there are some potential takers for that growth, AI for customer support operations. That's the second largest department in terms of spend on our platform that we can observe after engineering. You can imagine some spend is going to be taken up by that. You can imagine that accelerating some growth, cybersecurity. So AI being used to deploy against cybersecurity attacks, I think will also be another accelerant to that. But it remains though, one to two trillion dollar question on the market, which is how far is this going to go? Will we have another coding agent revolution? Because today many of the projections are hoping for a commercial advancement that has not come true yet. Yeah. It seems as though in order for this to work now, they need to find new businesses. Essentially, they need to find new areas of business to expand the number because yes, they're generating huge amounts of revenue, tens of billions of dollars. But they're also about to spend hundreds of billions of tovers. So that top line needs to grow. This is particularly relevant because anthropic is about to go public. We reportedly, we're going to get a two trillion dollar valuation. That was the target a couple of months ago. It has since come down to around $1.3 trillion. We will see what happens. We have any thoughts or predictions on how this will trade and what investors are going to be looking for when this company finally goes public. When we talk to investors, there are a couple of things that I think are very interesting and that they want to see from the model companies. One, for a long time, the expectation was that AI spend will continue to rise and that's sort of big spender group, primarily those engineers. I think the market has started to understand that maybe we can't expect ever rising growth from that segment anymore. I think the market is hoping to see proliferation and increased intensity of AI adoption specifically outside the tech sector. They do want to see where these other bets will go, AI for other non-technical work. I thought it was really interesting that products coming out for consumers or products coming out. They're trying to get that sort of office suite. But again, an open question about whether or not that will be able to power the same rate of growth that we saw this sort of hyper growth 2026 is going to come from other teams. It's not just going to come from engineering. One of the other really interesting things that you have highlighted is the extent to which these two companies really are dependent on spending by a very, very small handful of VC backed startups. The reason I've found this really interesting is because it basically shows us that the AI economy, as it stands, is basically dependent on money that was raised from investors. The startups raised from investors in Silicon Valley. That is then sent to an anthropic and open AI. Essentially, it means that if VC dollars dry up and we're starting to see a little bit of anxiety in the markets, which could signal that the money will start to slow down, then that will spell significant issues for the startups at the bottom of the application layer and then, of course, it'll mean problems for anthropic and open AI. Could you talk a little bit more about what we know about how much those VC backed startups are spending on anthropic and open AI and the extent to which those two labs are dependent on these startups? It's interesting because people will see that same chart and report it in two very different ways depending on where they stand on the AI trade. The data point that we reported is that the top 1% of companies, 1% of companies rather, just drive 80% of the spent for open AI and then within that top 1%, 80% of them, so pretty much all of them, are VC backed and they're typically in tech, finance and technical services. That is where AI has both proven its value, particularly for those sort of engineering heavy organizations and the big spenders are sort of in that VC backed group. So many people will read that and say, well, that makes sense. These are the sort of forward thinking companies that are investing so much in AI, the rest of the market is going to go in that direction. As much as I understand that, I do want to remind people that, look, concentration in industry is fine. It's a problem when it's highly correlated, especially when it's something like VC where these dollars tend to move with each other no matter the company or its use case. And if you did end up in some world in which spend starts to slow down, then you see those effects cascade throughout the rest of the stack. You start to see them disproportionately impact open and anthropic revenues. And if those have a disproportionate impact on the markets, they can affect parts of our economy that don't touch AI at all. So that really is one of the big risks affecting the AI trade today. Again, if open and anthropic are able to develop a commercially advanced product that drives sufficient ROI outside of the tech sector, then and it drives enough adoption that they're less reliant on these tech companies, then I would start to change my tune. I wouldn't worry about this at all necessarily. But that is an if and it's something that they have not yet necessarily demonstrated. Our Corrosion is lead economist at Ramp R always appreciate your time. Thank you. Okay, that's it for today. One quick note before we end our research associate, Kristen O'Donohue, is hosting a live stream tomorrow on the 13th at 1pm Eastern time. She will be discussing how America is losing its scientific edge and what that means for our country's future. To join that, head to profgmedia.com and sign up for profg plus. We hope to see you there. This episode was produced by Clamiller and Allison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Brad Williams. I'll read it. research team is down to long, Christian O'Donohue and Amir Soverio, and our social producer is Jake Nick Ferson. Thank you for listening to Profty Markets from Profty Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Ed Elson and tune in tomorrow for a conversation with Katherine Anne Edwards. Support for the show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. If you have a dog or cat, here's something you need to know. According to Forbes, 1 in 3 pets will need emergency treatment this year. And every 6 seconds, a pet parent gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000. Vett bills don't have to hit that hard. Fetch is pet insurance that covers accidents, illnesses, and emergency visits, and pays back up to 90% of eligible vet bills. No wonder pet parents give Fetch an excellent rating on trust pilot. 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Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. The holiday season prompts consumers to focus on festive treats, with Philadelphia cream cheese being the go-to ingredient for classic recipes.
  2. Yahoo's Scout helps families manage screen time, find family-friendly activities, and discover meals that work for all ages without prior planning.
  3. The Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is at the center of a major scandal involving an alleged affair with a Chinese national, Alice Huang, a former executive with ties to Chinese state media.
  4. The scandal raises serious questions about U.S. export controls on AI chips, with evidence suggesting chips were being smuggled through Singapore to China via Chinese-linked entities.
  5. Despite clear U.S. export rules banning chips from Chinese-controlled firms, the Commerce Department delayed action, allowing MegaSpeed to remain on Nvidia’s cloud partner list.
  6. This inaction and lack of enforcement signal a potential breach of national security policy and raise concerns about political influence and internal corporate decision-making.
  7. AI spending growth is slowing, with token prices falling sharply due to fierce competition among U.S. AI firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, and emerging players such as SpaceX AI.
  8. Investors and analysts are now focusing on whether AI will expand beyond engineering teams into broader enterprise use cases like customer support and cybersecurity.

Summary:

As the holiday season begins, the focus shifts to festive traditions and treats, with Philadelphia cream cheese highlighted as a staple in classic recipes. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s Scout offers practical tools for families to manage daily routines, from screen time to meal planning. S.

export controls on advanced AI chips. S. policy that bans such exports.

Despite these violations, the Commerce Department has delayed action, allowing the company MegaSpeed to remain on Nvidia’s list of cloud partners, raising serious questions about policy enforcement, national security, and political influence. S. AI firms, including OpenAI and Anthropic.

The market is now shifting focus from engineering-heavy use cases to broader enterprise applications like customer service and cybersecurity. While short-term revenue growth at Anthropic may still be strong, long-term success hinges on expanding adoption beyond tech sectors and demonstrating commercial value in non-technical fields. Investors face uncertainty as AI’s growth appears to be plateauing, and the future of the sector depends on innovation and diversification.

FAQs

Philadelphia is the original cream cheese made with fresh milk and real cream, recommended for holiday recipes.

Yahoo's Scout helps with finding family-friendly activities, balancing screen time, and discovering meals that work for all ages.

Plod is an AI-powered note-taking device that captures conversations with one tap, without needing to open an app or stop what you're doing.

The U.S. policy requires a license for any AI chips to go to China or to any company headquartered in China, including subsidiaries or cutouts located abroad.

Yes, if Jensen Huang knew that a company was a Chinese entity or engaged in export violations, exporting to it could be considered a felony under U.S. law.

The Commerce Department delayed blacklisting MegaSpeed despite knowing it was run by a Chinese spy, raising concerns about policy enforcement and national security.

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