This is also why I remain skeptical of Anthropic.
My concern is not safety alignment. Safety is necessary.
What worries me is the control mindset outside of safety.
When Anthropic has a technical lead, it seems comfortable using that lead to set premium pricing simply because it can, tightly control access to its best capabilities, and monitor or restrict usage in ways that go beyond basic safety needs.
That may maximize short-term margins, but it leaves less room for small builders to experiment, survive, and create businesses on top of the platform.
To me, frontier AI is becoming infrastructure. Infrastructure should create room for an ecosystem, not squeeze as much value as possible back into the platform owner.
I think this will eventually backfire.
Within the next year, I expect Anthropic to be overtaken by other frontier AI companies — probably more than one.
Safety needs guardrails. Ecosystems need room to breathe.
Field Notes — Where do the jobs go after AI?
We talk a lot about the jobs AI will replace.
What gets discussed much less is: where does the new demand go?
I don’t think demand disappears. It becomes more fragmented, personalized, and specialized.
AI lowers the minimum cost of starting a company. Work that once required a 20-person team may soon be done by 3–5 people with agents.
That could change the structure of the service economy.
Instead of one SaaS serving 100,000 users, we may see 100 highly specialized businesses, each serving a few thousand customers with a tiny team.
Large companies will keep cutting standardized roles and building general-purpose platforms.
Some of the people leaving those organizations — engineers, product managers, marketers, consultants, industry experts — will use AI to form much smaller companies and serve needs that were previously too narrow to be economical.
A marketing team for dentists.
An AI compliance service for one type of exporter.
A growth service just for indie game developers.
An after-sales service for one category of industrial equipment.
The important part is that these companies can’t survive by simply wrapping the same general AI everyone else has.
Generic AI becomes infrastructure. Specialized service becomes the product.
The scarce skill shifts from doing the work to understanding a specific customer, designing the service, and owning the outcome.
This is why I keep emphasizing AI services.
AI may reduce the number of people needed inside large companies, while simultaneously reducing the minimum viable size of a new company.
The future may be less about everyone finding a job in a large organization — and more about many more people building very small, highly specialized service businesses.