Krishna Rao appears on a podcast

Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao appears on his first podcast to explain his role overseeing the company's compute procurement and capital allocation. He introduces that when he joined 2 years ago, annual run-rate revenue was about $250 million, and it has now grown to around $30 billion. He has also been involved in raising about $75 billion, and is responsible for allocating compute across Trainium, TPU, and GPU.

The conversation centers on the following topics:

• the cone of uncertainty
• why returns on frontier intelligence keep rising
• recursive self-improvement and scaling laws
• platform vs. application strategy and Anthropic's own products
• how Claude is used internally
• investor misconceptions about model companies and compute procurement

In the latter part, the discussion covers public perception, risk, government regulation, and biotech/healthcare, and at the end, Krishna Rao gives a surprising answer to the "kindest thing" question he's been asked more than 500 times.