❯ NYT: Meta internally projected spending up to $10 billion a year on Anthropic’s models

criticizing and buyingMeta has internally projected annual spending of as much as $10 billion on Anthropic’s AI models even as Mark Zuckerberg publicly criticizes the rival, The New York Times reported. Around the same period the two are negotiating a deal running the other direction: Meta leasing compute to Anthropic, also in the range of $10 billion over two years.

two opposing cash flowsThe compute-leasing talks surfaced only in July and remain early, according to reports. One flow has Meta paying for Anthropic’s model capability; the other has Anthropic paying for Meta’s data centers. Zuckerberg frames external leasing as a hedge on self-built capacity — if internal demand does not fill the racks, rental revenue covers the gap. That is also why the public posture and the purchasing decisions can run in parallel: the criticism is about strategy, the purchase is about capacity.

who recalculatesEnterprise buyers can read a blunt signal here: even the company most aggressive about training its own frontier models is budgeting billions for someone else’s, which makes “build fully replaces buy” a shakier economic case than it looks. Anthropic’s revenue mix gets rewritten in the process — one of its largest customers is the competitor attacking it in public.

▪ SIGNALWhen public criticism and a ten-figure purchase order coexist, believe the purchase order.