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Episode: Anthropic’s Bet on Coding Is Working (OpenAI Shopping Pivot, A16Z’s Top 50 List, $1B Tennis Channel)

Date: March 13, 2026
Hosts: Dave Morin, Jessica Lessin, Brit Morin, Sam Lessin

Episode Overview

This spirited, freewheeling conversation among friends and longtime tech insiders dives deep into the current inflection points of the AI business. The discussion centers around Anthropic’s surging momentum in the developer market, OpenAI’s evolving consumer strategy and pivot away from consumer shopping, the challenges of monetizing “intelligence” as a utility, and the growing relevance of “dark pools” and proprietary networks in a world where software is increasingly commoditized. Other topics include notable new AI products (and some weird corners of the internet), upcoming entertainment industry events, and whether buying the Tennis Channel is a smart play.

Key Themes & Discussion Points

1. The Business of Selling Intelligence: Commodity or Goldmine?

• Opening Frame: Dave Morin sets the tone with the central question: Is selling intelligence (AI) a good business or just a commodity? He analogizes the situation to selling bandwidth in 1995—potentially lucrative for a while, but the real value may accrue to what’s built on top.

  "Maybe it's not. Maybe it's a commodity, maybe it's cable... It's like being in 95, asking if selling bandwidth is a good business. It's not where the money ended up. The money ended up in what people built on top of it."
  (Dave Morin, 00:00)

• Margin Compression: Sam Lessin points out that in a hyper-competitive, frictionless global market, any incremental gains in “intelligence” pricing will vanish due to arbitrage and open-source competition.

  “It’s so much worse than the cable business...with total perfect competition globally. It’s going to be a way worse business than the cable model.”
  (Sam Lessin, 23:32)

2. OpenAI’s Consumer Pivot: From Chatbot King to Shopping Platform?

• OpenAI’s Path: Jessica Lessin highlights OpenAI’s massive consumer growth and early attempts to convert usage into revenue, particularly through shopping integrations. However, the company’s recent shift away from allowing end-to-end transactions within ChatGPT signals unresolved friction and uncertainty in consumer monetization.

  “Commerce from a revenue potential is one of these big moments where OpenAI could prove… that it is actually going to turn it into a business. And early on we see them pivoting, shifting, whatever you call it”
  (Jess, 15:00)

• Skeptical Counterpoint: Sam Lessin is highly skeptical about commerce as a lucrative path for OpenAI. He draws distinctions between attention-driven ad businesses (Google, Facebook) and commerce-driven ones (Amazon), contending that the latter is much harder and lower margin.

  “Everybody keeps saying ‘why don’t you just do commerce?’. Because commerce is a bad business. What’s good is the attention.”
  (Sam Lessin, 16:25)

3. Anthropic’s Bet on Developers—and the Exponential Payoff

• Data Trends: Dave Morin and Brit Morin discuss charts showing OpenAI’s consumer lead versus Anthropic’s rapid (and superlinear) revenue acceleration, driven by developer adoption and code-centric offerings.

  “Anthropic accelerating dramatically because of this strategic choice they made... if they hadn’t, they may not be in the same position that they are today.”
  (Dave Morin, 08:42)

• Developer vs. Consumer: The panel explores why developers may have a much larger “ARPU” (average revenue per user) because they see immediate value in scaling app-building, while most consumers have limited high-value use cases for AI.

  “Developers are like, I just fucking built an entire app... in 20 minutes and launched it...so like, yeah, I’ll just burn a ton of intelligence to do that, right?”
  (Sam Lessin, 10:14)

4. Is AI Unlocking a New “Indie” Creative Wave?

• Democratizing Creation: Dave argues that AI is breaking down the divide between “consumer” and “builder,” enabling creatives of all stripes (not just developers) to make significant cultural impact with new tools.

  “AI is turning everyone into a builder... I was down in Palo Alto... these guys are filmmakers, writers, creative people… and they're building things with AI now.”
  (Dave Morin, 19:15)

• Comparison to Past Mediums: Dave draws parallels to the indie video wave sparked by cheap camcorders, arguing AI is the next creative inflection point.

  “When camcorders got cheap, the film industry started using them and doing really interesting things... This new medium is going to cause really, really interesting things.”
  (Dave Morin, 31:10 & 31:34)

5. The Death of Open Marketplaces & The Rise of “Dark Pools”

• Collapse of Open Marketplaces: Sam contends that as software becomes easier and cheaper to write (or just generate via AI), competitive advantages increasingly depend on proprietary access, closed networks, and dark pools rather than open marketplaces:

  “When markets get too efficient, they're bad businesses and technology and AI make markets efficient. The only way to have a good business is to have proprietary deal flow... dark pools.”
  (Sam Lessin, 36:29)

• Commoditization of Software: Brit and Jess argue there will still be rare, defensible network effects (e.g., Instagram’s dense social graph), but moats are harder to sustain.

  “Not all Sam is saying all software is dead. And I just disagree.”
  (Brit Morin, 42:27)

6. A16Z’s Top 50 AI Web Products & The Rise of AI “Romantasy”

• Brit’s Bot Corner (44:07):

  • Fewer creator-centric tools in this year’s A16Z Top 50 list, perhaps due to Google’s Gemini rise in the creator tools sphere.

  • Discovery of surprise hits in adult/romance AI chat space, e.g., Janitor.AI, Spicy Chat, and Crush on—mostly anime-style, chat-based erotica with enormous unique visits.

    "They're all AI, Anime Eroticism. I'm not sure what's happening here...You just chat with it. And it's like your ... anime misogynist husband chatbot. And this is what people pay for."
    (Brit Morin, 46:06)

  • Longer discussion about how AI fantasy platforms are focusing not on hyperrealism, but on prompting the user’s imagination—“the mind is the most powerful machine.”

    "The mind is the most powerful machine, and all you're looking for with these AIs is unique... that's why things like lo-fi cartoons or anime that's like over weird tentacle porn..."
    (Sam Lessin, 47:54)

7. The Tennis Channel for $1 Billion?

• Deal of the Week: Jess floats the prospect of buying the Tennis Channel for a billion dollars – a sports media ploy reminiscent of what happened to F1.
  • Panel weighs whether it’s a smart business, noting viewership is growing, profitability (~$73 million/year), and whether the real asset is broadcast rights or the fan experience innovation opportunity.

  “F1 had minuscule viewership 10 years ago and they just made it great and it boomed... you’d have to make a bet on making the tennis viewing experience great.”
  (Jess, 51:17)

8. Sports, Oscars, and Pop Culture Wrap-Up

• The crew briefly riffs on the return of Travis Kelce & Taylor Swift, Oscars predictions (Leonardo DiCaprio film “One Battle After Another” favored, “Hamnet” trending as a tearjerker), and wardrobe hype ("Emma Stone will wear something great").
• Brit and Jess joke about future “AI agents” recommending pop culture to each other and the fact that “agent” now has a double meaning in both Hollywood and tech.

  “Are agents in Hollywood mad that we now call agents something that are machines?”
  (Sam Lessin, 56:02)

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• On where the money in AI will flow:

  “It's not like, will the intelligence get cheaper? Is there margin in the intelligence? The question is like, what can you make with it that you couldn't make before?”
  (Dave Morin, 00:00 / 28:17)

• On AI business models and margin pressures:

  "Just because you use a lot of something doesn't mean it's valuable or a good business...I think anything that is basically software...is just going to be an undefensible business because it's too easy to replicate."
  (Sam Lessin, 21:28 / 35:11)

• On global, hyper-competitive AI markets:

  "You have a global frictionless competition for the cheapest power and the cheapest intelligence you can get anywhere, right? And that means that it's going to be a way worse business than the cable model."
  (Sam Lessin, 23:32)

• On the creativity unleashed by AI:

  “AI is turning everyone into a builder...I was down in Palo Alto last night...they're building things with AI now.”
  (Dave Morin, 19:15)

• On Britt’s experiments with AI adult bots:

  “One of them, you just...chat with it. And it's like your AI anime misogynist husband, chatbot. And this is what people pay for. And this is in the top...”
  (Brit Morin, 46:37)

Timestamps for Major Segments

• 00:00: Is selling intelligence a good business? (Opening debate, bandwidth analogy)
• 06:38: Key news headlines: OpenAI's shopping pivot; Anthropic vs. OpenAI; Abilene infrastructure shakeup
• 08:05: Comparing OpenAI and Anthropic revenue charts and business models
• 10:14: Developer vs. consumer ARPU and why Anthropic’s strategy is paying off
• 14:55: OpenAI’s push into commerce, pivoting away from direct shopping in ChatGPT
• 23:25: The global commodity nature of intelligence and power vs. cable business analogy
• 31:10: AI as a new creative medium, parallels to indie video/film movements
• 36:29: “Death of the open marketplace” and rise of dark pools and proprietary networks
• 44:07: Brit’s Bot Corner: The A16Z AI web tools list, rise of AI “romantasy” chatbots
• 51:10: Is buying the Tennis Channel for $1B a smart play?
• 53:33: Sports/pop culture wrap-up: Taylor Swift, Oscars, AI “agents” vs. Hollywood agents

Takeaways & Insights

• Utility AI margins will be squeezed by global competition; the real upside will be software and services built on top.
• Anthropic’s focus on developer tools and code has created exponential business momentum.
• OpenAI’s search for a consumer business model faces very real friction—even with massive mindshare, translating usage to revenue is nontrivial.
• Commoditization of software means future moats will lie in proprietary networks, relationships, and data—not in the software layer itself.
• There’s a Cambrian explosion of creative potential thanks to AI democratization, but turning these creations into large, defensible businesses is far trickier—and dark pools/closed communities may be the dominant model.
• Surprising new consumer behaviors are emerging, like paying for AI “romantasy” chatbots in the top web products lists.
• The business of traditional media (e.g., Tennis Channel) is still about rights and the race to innovate the experience.

For next week: Will the dark pools concentrate power, or does the creative explosion find ways to break them open? And, as always, how will the narrative (and the charts) shift?