Anthropic Is a $350 Billion Problem for Hollywood About to Strike
Soon, the company’s Claude will be as standard in industry offices as Slack and Excel — reshaping who gets hired and what gets made
I cover the intersection of Hollywood and AI for paid subscribers. I wrote about eight companies doing AI the right way, explored Disney’s deal with OpenAI and dove into what AI performer Tilly Norwood means for actors.
Anthropic is not a movie studio, a streamer or even a consumer tech product — but it may pose a greater long-term threat to Hollywood than anything we currently talk about.
The San Francisco-based AI company doesn’t need tech that can write hit movies or replace A-list talent to reshape the entertainment business. It only needs to replace the systems that decide what gets made, who gets hired and how quickly decisions happen — work that has historically employed thousands of people across Hollywood’s middle class.
Founded by former OpenAI executives — siblings Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei — Anthropic is built around a large language model called Claude and backed by a roster of investors that reads like the Death Star meets Silicon Valley.
Major tech companies including Google (Alphabet) and Amazon are among its most significant funders, alongside Microsoft and NVIDIA, which means that four out of the five largest companies in the world are all investors — making the cap-table look like a cool $14 trillion in market cap as backers. And Anthropic is now raising capital at a staggering $300-$350 billion valuation, or roughly the same valuation as Chinese behemoth Alibaba, which is more than xAI ($230B) but less than OpenAI’s last round ($500B+), suggesting investors expect the company to generate tens of billions of dollars in recurring, high‑margin revenue.
While some Wall Street prognosticators are warning of an AI bubble, the disruption of American business by this tech is already so deeply in motion that even a major correction won’t slow its roll.
The power players investing in Anthropic are also massively propping up its value: Each company has announced multibillion‑dollar strategic partnerships tied to cloud infrastructure and AI compute. On the financial side, Anthropic’s fundraising has drawn in institutional heavyweights like ICONIQ Capital, Fidelity, BlackRock, Blackstone, GIC and T. Rowe Price, as well as venture firms such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, General Atlantic and Coatue across successive funding rounds. This is not a scrappy experiment — it is being built as core infrastructure, almost too big to fail by virtue of the players involved in it.
Claude itself was not designed to be a consumer plaything that goes viral on social media. Anthropic built it around what it calls “constitutional AI,” a framework intended to make the model safer, more predictable and more controllable for enterprise use (think other commonplace SaaS products like Excel or Slack). In Hollywood terms, Claude is pre‑cleared: the kind of AI studios and corporations feel comfortable piloting internally without legal and HR immediately hitting the brakes. (Claude also generated headlines last year, however, for its ability to deceive and blackmail humans.)
Claude doesn’t have to replace writers, directors or stars to change Hollywood’s labor economics. It replaces readers, assistants, junior executives and development teams — and it does so invisibly. Studios don’t announce AI layoffs. They just stop hiring for jobs Claude can already do. That’s how disruption arrives in Hollywood now: quietly, structurally and without a press release.
In today’s newsletter, I dig into:
How Claude could wipe out entire layers of personnel across studios and streamers through its ability to reshape development, scripts, analysis, greenlights, marketing and franchise building
How an author lawsuit nearly exposed Anthropic to hundreds of billions in liability — and why the settlement put a price on stories that Hollywood never collected
What a $350 billion valuation really signals about Anthropic’s power vs. Hollywood
Is Anthropic’s march into the industry an inevitability?
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This is a really solid piece, but I think the framing misses something important - Anthropic's valuation isn't really about Hollywood specifically. That $300-350B is betting on enterprise adoption everywhere, and entertainment is honestly probably a pretty small slice of that pie.
What does worry me though is the middle-class labor point. Not because Claude is secretly perfect at script coverage (it's not), but because studios are so desperate to cut costs that they'll adopt these tools even when the quality isn't quite there yet. And then suddenly there are no entry-level jobs, and in 10 years everyone's wondering why there's no pipeline of experienced execs who actually understand storytelling.
The copyright settlement angle is interesting too. I've been tracking how entertainment companies are thinking about AI partnerships vs. the data licensing question, and there's definitely some confusion about what leverage they actually have. Like, OpenAI is out here making deals with studios and publishers while Anthropic just... settled with authors directly. Two totally different strategies for the same problem.
(I actually write about this stuff weekly in my AI x Media Report newsletter if anyone wants more of this kind of analysis - been covering how these AI companies are positioning themselves differently in entertainment and what that means for professionals in Media & Entertainment.)
Anyway, the "too big to fail" investor lineup is the scariest part to me. When Google, Amazon, Microsoft AND NVIDIA are all backing the same AI company, good luck organizing any kind of coordinated industry pushback.