You ever notice how everyone’s super principled… until the check clears? Like, really principled. The type of person who won’t eat Chick-fil-A because of politics or something the company stands for, but has no problem ordering a $1,400 MacBook made by factory workers in Africa who haven’t seen daylight since the iPhone 6 (kinda like billionaires telling us to ride our bikes to work while they fly their private jets around the world).

And as we’ve all seen since Brutus shanked Julius Caesar for a seat at the Roman power table (talk about insider trading), in the world of high finance and AI, morals tend to vanish faster than a reddit degen trader’s Robinhood balance after YOLO-ing earnings on weekly options. (RIP to anyone who bet the farm on Intel.)

Case in point: Anthropic, the OpenAI rival behind the AI assistant Claude, has been galloping the “we don’t take dictator money” moral high horse for a while now. CEO Dario Amodei literally warned staff that accepting money from the Middle East could compromise the company’s values. Very noble. Very Stanford AI ethics seminar.

But oh, how the turntables… Now they’re “in early talks” with MGX, Abu Dhabi’s massive AI war chest, about a fresh investment… if it comes with a $150 billion valuation. (For reference, that’s more than double their last mark of $61.5B.) So yeah… that moral high horse they were riding? Turns out it was more of a rented pony.

Let’s not pretend this is new. Remember LIV Golf? All those PGA players came out hot against the Saudi-backed league. Said it was blood money. That the Saudis “kill people” (Phil Mickelson’s actual quote). That they’d never sell out. Then LIV showed up with the kind of money that makes private jet owners consider buying islands… and everyone suddenly got a little more “open-minded.” It’s amazing how “executing journalists” can start looking like “geopolitical nuance” when there’s $200 million on the table.

Anyway, back to Anthropic. They’re the ones behind Claude… basically the corporate version of ChatGPT. Not as flashy, but it’s been quietly making moves in the enterprise world. Their revenue jumped from $1 billion to $4 billion just this year, and 80% of that is coming from business subscriptions. So yeah, they’re not playing in the kiddie pool anymore. They’ve also got some big ballers backing them. Amazon has already poured in $8 billion and apparently wants to double down just to keep their grip on the company. Google’s in there too, because obviously.

But even with all that momentum, Anthropic (and OpenAI, for that matter) is still spending money like prime Bernie Madoff (minus the robbing peter to pay paul fraud, hopefully). It’s not because they’re reckless… it’s just the reality of the AI arms race.

(Source: Tom’s Hardware)

Training these giant models isn’t cheap. It takes mountains of compute power, racks of GPUs, and enough electricity to black out a small city (that’s not hyperbole). And then you’ve got the talent war. Mark Zuckerberg is out here throwing $100 million comp packages at top AI researchers like they’re Amazon gift cards at Christmas. (Honestly, if you’ve ever written a decent Python script, now might be the time to update that LinkedIn profile.)

Even with Amazon and Google already cutting checks, the pressure to raise more never really goes away. And when someone comes along dangling a fresh $3–$5 billion (and they’re willing to value your company at $150 billion) that’s when those so-called “non-negotiables” start to feel a lot more negotiable. Which brings us to the awkward part. 

Anthropic has publicly said they don’t want to take money from authoritarian regimes. Their CEO, Dario Amodei, even sent out a memo this week warning that doing so could “enrich dictators.” But then he also admitted that “no bad person should ever benefit from our success” is a pretty tough standard to run a business by. In other words: we tried to be good… but man, that valuation is looking real fine right now.

Because at the end of the day, this isn’t really about who builds the smartest chatbot or who sticks to their ethical code the longest. It’s about scale, market share, and staying in the game long enough to matter.

These companies aren’t here to play nice. They’re here to dominate… and if that means swallowing their morals to outpace OpenAI, so be it. In the race for AI supremacy, the only rule that matters is: Don’t lose.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Intel, Amazon, and Google as mentioned in the article.