As the AI World Turns — Anthropic, Figma and the Great Betrayal | Shimmy Says
Shimmy Says
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19m
Welcome to As the AI World Turns — the new Shimmy Says series treating the AI industry as what it has actually become: the most expensive soap opera ever produced. Today, Anthropic. The company founded to be the principled alternative to OpenAI is facing a Silicon Valley backlash. Anthropic quietly resigned from Figma's board three days before launching Claude Design — a product that moves directly into Figma's territory. Figma CEO Dylan Field said Anthropic had "not been consistently candid." The Wall Street Journal reports the backlash is spreading across the valley.Alan Shimel argues this is a pattern, not a one-off — and a textbook case of what he calls The Indispensability Trap. Being indispensable to another company is not the same as owning the customer, so every model provider is now racing up the stack. OpenAI into coding, search and browsers. Microsoft into its own models and copilots. Amazon into models while owning the infrastructure beneath Anthropic. Nvidia from chips into networking, systems, software, models and cloud services. Everyone praises the ecosystem while quietly studying which parts of it can be swallowed next.Alan also examines Anthropic's open-weight stance, its distillation campaign against DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax, and its 30-day retention rule — and asks the uncomfortable question: when safety is also a formidable competitive moat, which motive is driving each decision?
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