What Anthropic’s Big Acquisition Could Mean
Anthropic has a shiny new addition I can’t stop thinking about: Reed Hastings, who is joining the AI startup’s board. I wonder if his arrival might hold greater significance than we might think.
Previously, Hastings has held few corporate board seats beyond the one he retains at Netflix after stepping down as CEO a couple years ago. Aside from Netflix, he’s also currently on Bloomberg LP’s board, and in the past, he sat on Microsoft’s (2007 to 2012) and Facebook’s (2011 to 2019).
Plenty of bigwigs like Hastings treat board seats like country club memberships, accumulating a small stack of them, and view their directorships more or less with the same seriousness as they would an afternoon scramble. Hastings, by contrast, seems more mindful about the boards he picks, suggesting he tends to take a seat when he thinks he might actually have a worthwhile perspective to add. (He wouldn’t comment for this column.)
Hastings has plenty of experience with two elements Anthropic needs to figure out (and combining them might really, really help it draw even with OpenAI): video as well as the task of branding a consumer subscription business. Obviously, Hastings did quite well at both while running Netflix.
In the AI market right now, Google’s Veo and OpenAI’s Sora have assumed leading positions. (There’s also Runway, but that’s more for professionals, as we’ve previously explained.) Meanwhile, Anthropic is noticeably absent.
The branding problem, meanwhile, is a universal concern within AI. How is Anthropic different from OpenAI? How is it different from Gemini? Even the most enthusiastic denizens of Silicon Valley would struggle to come up with a cogent answer. The average person on the internet certainly couldn’t, and that’s exactly who Anthropic needs to win over. Reed, a little help there! (Here’s a freebie idea: I think one of the most interesting things Anthropic could build is an advanced version of the interactive entertainment system that powered the “Bandersnatch” episode from “Black Mirror.” The concept for a choose-your-own-adventure plot was clever, though obviously limited by how much content the filmmakers could produce. Think what it could be like powered by generative AI…)
From his time on Facebook’s board, Hastings must also have a keen perspective on the risks of warp-speed growth and of the proliferation of an entirely new form of the internet. But surely safety-focused Anthropic wouldn’t need his advice on that subject.