← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Trump Extended His Iran Deadline, Iran Ceasefire Is Already Falling Apart, Claude Leak Exposed Unreleased Features That Will Change AI Forever | Weekly Recap
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B
Mayor Mamdani tweeted out Happy Easter, New York. Today, millions of New Yorkers celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the victory of hope over despair and faith over fear. The Muslim socialists and the Christian president said, today will be a power plant day, bridge day. All hope all wrapped up in one. In Iran, there will be nothing like it. Open the effing straight or you'll be living in hell. Just watch. Praise be to Allah. President Donald J. Trump. Talk about threats. That. That's a spicy one. What was your initial reaction seeing that tweet?
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A
It is more of what I come to expect from the President, Much to my dismay. I really do miss the era of a president being presidential. I won't lie. I find this stuff morbidly hilarious. Emphasis on the morbidly so. There is an entertainment value. There's a shock value, to be sure. But you know, when you're talking about human life, this stuff all gets very dark way, way, way too fast. So I couldn't believe it. It was one of those. I had to fact check it. I was like, there's no way that's what it actually said. Right? Like, this is cause tweets in his voice all the time. But yep, that one actually does seem to be real. He's like, in the beginning of this term, you could see he was trying to be restrained. He dropped the 1F bomb and it was like, oh my God, it's a big deal. Like, can you believe the President said that? And then you see how far it's gotten. And clearly this is somebody who's building a mental map of the Iranians as being completely unwilling to negotiate, willing to let their country just be burned to the ground. We started to get this sense of what the Trump administration's mental map was of this whole process. What when Witkoff said, we can't believe that they haven't capitulated, so we're sending all this hardware, all of these troops, everything over into the region and they're just not doing anything with it. Once we could see that's where they're mapping all of this stuff out is they're being unreasonable, that you should be able to build up force, hold a club to somebody's head, put a gun in their face, and they react in a prescripted way. And the fact that they're not reacting that way, I think is very shocking to Trump, and so we're seeing that in this latest tweet. The praise be to Allah part is what spun a lot of people out, not the you crazy bastards, you'll be living in hell, all that. The praise be to Allah. It admittedly is an amusing choice, but nonetheless, Trump has now extended the power plant and bridge Day deadline three times. Something like two or three times. The current cutoff is Tuesday, April 8th at 8pm Eastern. We'll see if that holds. Iran has made it clear it has no intention of meeting that deadline. On Sunday, Trump told the Wall Street Journal, if they don't do something by Tuesday evening, they won't have any power plants and they won't have any bridges standing. Trump backs up the things that he claims, even when it seems absolutely politically suicidal. If he does not see some sort of off ramp, you can expect him to push forward with that. I'll be very surprised, however, if he doesn't extend this again pretty substantively if he's seeing cues that he has somebody that he can work with now. The Tuesday deadline is the latest in a series of ultimatums from your boy. Trump first demanded Iran fully reopen the Strait within 48 hours on March 21. Then he extended that window and now we'll see if the 8pm Eastern one holds. Iran's response basically coming directly from their foreign minister, he told Al Jazeera flatly, at present there is no negotiation and I can feel these guys like banging the table. It's like, how many times do I have to say this? We're not negotiating with them, which seems like a lie. P.S. by the way, I think they're standing on literal words. Seems pretty apparent that there is back channel negotiation going on with Pakistan. The speaker of Iran's parliament posted that no negotiations have been held, calling Trump's announcements a scheme to manipulate oil markets. The gap between what each side is claiming is getting pretty wide, but hopefully we're all getting used to that at this point. Trump told Axios that talks are going well and said there's a good chance of a deal, but warned if they don't make a deal, I am blowing up everything over there. That is a quote. The structural problem is this. Iran's counter demands are wild and they include an end to all US and Israeli strikes. Fair ask. Full sanctions relief. Going to have a hard time with that one. Keeping its missile program intact. That's obviously a non starter. War reparations, that's laughable. And international recognition of Iranians sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. Good luck with that. Washington has called their terms a non starter as you would expect. And an advisor to Iran's new supreme leader threatened closure of the Bab Al Mandab Strait as well. So that's on the other side. Just trying to make sure that everybody's escalating from a just absolute mass chaos standpoint. Remember this is existential and it's existential for both sides. You've got Trump on a one way ticket to prison. If he doesn't maintain power in the midterms, he will get impeached almost certainly. And then if and when he goes out of office, all bets are off if the Democrats are in power. So he's looking at this from a. Well, it's sort of Mount Rushmore or bust. And then the Iranians literally life and death on their side. So expect people to continue to be completely irrational from the other person's side because when somebody's backed into a corner like that and it really does seem existential from their perspective, they have a totally different set of calculus. So yeah, this one's gonna just continue
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B
to be strange in everything though because I feel like this is his fourth or fifth like deadline ultimatum. Does this specific narrative worry you that
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A
he backs off all the time?
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B
No, no, no, just this specific threat. Because I have a poll, I have a poll in the chat right now. Does Tuesday's deadline, you know, cause trustee.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Because I feel like civilian infrastructure is a bit of a different category. But I don't know if we are just categorizing this as like, oh well, this is just like he threatened the oil, this is just like he threatened the island. This is just like he threatened the Strait before. Or is. Does this feel different with you because of the bridge, because of the.
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A
Well here's the really bad news. It doesn't feel different. This feels like the normal escalatory path that I would expect Trump to be on with. Reg feels that it's in an existential fight for its life. However, I would like PSA time to remind us all that we are the frog being slowly boiled. And if I went back in time to say October and I said this is the headline in, you know, April, what sixth? You guys would be like, no way. Like there's no way. That's so crazy. And yet here we are. So I think it's important for all of us to remind ourselves how insane this moment really is, that we really are at war right now, that we are threatening to take out their energy, their civilian bridges, which will cause retaliatory strikes across the GCC nations, which will. If you think oil prices are rough right now, wait till you see when we wipe out Iran. Iran then wipes out a bunch of places across the Gulf because oil prices are set internationally. So you're going to hear Trump bang one drum over and over and over. The US doesn't need the oil from the rest of the world. Cool. Great. However, oil prices are set internationally, meaning there's a certain amount of oil that is produced every day that can be shipped around the world. And if you have oil in your country meant to go to the people in your town and somebody around the world, namely China, goes, well, you just blew up everything in Iran where we were getting between Venezuela and IRAN Something like 20% of China's oil. Now all of a sudden they're going to start bidding for that oil that was meant to stay domestic, but now those producers are cool guys. I'll let it stay domestic, but you're going to have to match the price that I can get on the international market. So the prices are still going to go up. Whether we're ever going to deal with shortages is a different story. You're still going to see the price climb. So that will be extraordinarily impactful to the global economy. So the reason that I hope, myself and everybody else included stays alert to just how high risk this moment is from a global economic standpoint, not just loss of human life standpoint, is that this is the kind of thing that escalates out of control. You're never able to get the escalatory dominance that you were hoping to get. And so the strait of hormone moves then just effectively get shut down and the world will respond. And Saudi for instance, is already beginning to pump oil over land. So it will do things like that will reorganize around North America, both the US and Canada that are, you know, getting richer because the world is now turning to us for more oil. So it's, it's all going to be these crazy trade offs. But that will take time. It will not be a smooth transition.
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B
Let's say that there is some good news on the horizon with that though. OPEC met yesterday and they are agreeing to increase their output. So at least from a Supply and demand perspective, they're at least helping add to the supply, which they can ship
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A
it around, you know, Foster. Yes, But a lot of this isn't that oil production is a problem right now. It's that moving the oil is the hard part. So that's awesome that OPEC is doing that for sure. But if a large portion of OPEC is getting bombed, then now you have a problem. So. And if they can't move it because the Houthis have talked about getting involved in the Red Sea, which would be create another choke point, it's probably more precarious than anybody wants you to think. Now we'll see how it plays out. No need to get out over our skis. But the reality of asymmetric warfare is such that Trump is going to continually feel like, how much do I have to bring break these guys before they finally give in? And because that's his mental model that I can put enough pressure on you and you will eventually cave. I think this is going to go really far. And he's going to destroy a lot of stuff, only to realize, like, damn, like, we really might have to put boots on the ground if we want to get where we want to get. And I worry that he would be willing to do that. There is a path where I can see this becomes runaway. Trump destroys their civilian infrastructure. They then respond even harder to and they just completely shut down the strait. They start attacking the oil infrastructure and possibly desalinization infrastructure across the Gulf. And now you're in a much worse global position again, we'll rebalance. I'm well aware that the world has no shortage of oil. There are plenty of places other than the Middle east where we can get oil. But the transition will be extraordinarily expensive.
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B
Going back to the Strait, there was reports from Fox News that they're thinking about doing some type of toll booth vessel fee. And then America responding to that will say, well, we'll do a $2 million escort fee for every vessel. So it's one of those things. Do you think that this is viable, having an actual escort versus a toll booth? It seems on paper it sounds good, but when missiles are flying, I don't know if any company wants to take that chance.
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A
I think the reality is that, first of all, the person that put that forward was just like a guy. That's not like actual Trump policy. But I think that if you're charging people that kind of money, first of all, you look like an asshole because you started this and now you're profiting off of it. If we were actually able to get people through the strait, we should do it for free and show people, hey, look, we can actually keep this straight open. I think the problem is we can't actually keep the straight open. We keep saying we can, but then a couple well placed drones and everybody gets real skittish. It's like that idea that, hey, there's, you know, whatever, only 30 soldiers with guns, they can't kill us all. It's like, yes, but they can kill the front two or three rows. So how do you get that momentum? Like how do you get the first people to run in to be the, you know, the machine gun fire? The Trump admin charging $2 million to solve a problem that they started is not going to go over well.
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B
Do you worry about any of the international implications of us attacking a bridge, attacking every day plants every day? Because that is an international war crime line. But I feel like nowadays it's like, what's a couple of war crimes among friends, literally. So I don't think we'll necessarily have anybody policing us in that. But is there some type of moral high ground we need to take or is at this point it's just we have to win, get out.
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A
We gave up the moral high ground a very long time ago. And so the only question is, does this moment in history mandate that you give up the moral high ground? I don't know. That will be a question for historians to look at. Living through it is not fun because all of the sense of like, okay, we're America, we're doing the just thing like that has gone out the window. Now the question becomes, are we doing the effective thing? Maybe we'll see. That will come out in the wash. Right now it looks like everything is up in the air and it is entirely possible that it all comes crashing back down to earth and that what we end up with is a situation where the global economy is in a recession because we have put ourselves in a position where we cannot effectively get the oil out of the Middle East. And we need to begin transitioning into a future world order, by the way, a world order where America is probably fine because of our geographic positioning, because of our access to resources, all of that. But it will be, how long does that take? Is that a year? Is it two years? Is it three years? That's a long time to be in the grips of a global recession. And the question is, does America stay stable? I won't say intact, but I will say stable through all of that because there is so much hatred between the two sides. Until we see how this actually plays out, until we see if the US can get a stable Iran, if we can get an open Strait of Hormuz, if we can get things flowing again, and then it looks like this sort of very icky, morally repugnant move that we made. If we can go, okay, well, in the end, we got what we wanted, which is a defanged Iran, a stable alliance in the Middle east, the Abraham Accords, bringing everybody together, finally, everybody in the Middle east looking at this as the economic problem that it is, instead of end of days theology, which is what it feels like more now. So if Trump can actually pull that off and on the other side of this in the very near term, like if this is a 30 day ish thing where we start seeing everything move in that direction, then I think people will go, okay, the results that we got justify what we did, you'll still have a ton of fighting over war crimes and get Trump out, lock him up, all of that, but it will deflate a lot. If the result is good, if the result is bad, he's toast. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere.
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B
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A
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A
Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.
- [16:14]
B
What do you think about the ceasefire?
- [16:15]
A
The details remain murky, there's a battle of narratives going on and there's a lot of conflicting details flying almost as fast as the additional rockets that have been flying. So I will say that at best the ceasefire is extremely fragile. Just like an hour or so before Trump's self imposed 8pm Tuesday deadline, the U.S. and Iran agreed tentatively to a two week ceasefire. That's it. They haven't agreed to points, they've agreed to a two week ceasefire. With peace talks set for Friday in Islamabad. Pakistan's Prime Minister Shabazz Sharif helped get the two week pause for negotiations across the finish line and he posted directly on X taking Trump, Vance, Rubio and Wyckoff, asking Trump to please extend the deadline two weeks and asking Iran as an act of good faith, to open the Strait. So Trump posted on Truth Social that based on conversations with Sharif and Pakistani Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir, he agreed to suspend bombing Iran for two weeks on the condition of a complete, immediate and safe opening of the Strait of Hormuz.
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B
We have some breaking news from tkl. Hasn't been verified with just reading the tweet and it's probably per an Iranian news agency so it could be propaganda. But allegedly the passage of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz has been stopped. Iran says it will withdraw from the ceasefire if Israel continues attacks on Lebanon and it is preparing potential responses. So last night it was reported via CNN that the ceasefire was between Israel and Iran. Iran sent some missiles allegedly to Tel Aviv. Like you said, we don't know if
- [17:46]
A
that was Iran also bombed the uae, Qatar, Bahrain.
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B
The timing was speculative so nobody knew what was happening. Israel bombed Lebanon this morning and now we're here. So again it could be a one day ceasefire and hopefully this stoppage is just temporary.
- [18:02]
A
Maybe we didn't even get to 24 hours. So yeah, this thing is fragile at best and I'm not even including Israel bombing Lebanon. I think that's a separate issue. It's terrible but nonetheless it's a separate issue. But we are not to the point of what Trump said that the two weeks was conditioned upon. Now I think on that Trump will be pretty forgiving for people that like to see taco sauce on Trump's chin. You can expect, expect him to. He's going to take that. There's no way he's going to go make good on the insane threats that he was promising. But over time, I think you could see that start to grate on him. So we'll see where we end up. Now, emotions are still going to be high. These are humans that we're talking about. So you can expect pettiness, you can expect people to drag their feet. Everybody should be assuming that neither the US Nor Iran is actually putting their real agenda on the table, that both sides are going to be using the beat to build their arsenals back up, to get rested so that they can fight some more. So please don't be surprised if any of this goes awry. Now, the mechanic that got Iran over the line, Trump said He received a 10 point proposal from Iran and called it a workable basis for negotiation. Not I've agreed to these points. This is where the most of the battle for the narrative has been taking place, is around what's been proposed, what's been agreed. There's like all these fake points that are going around and Trump is talking about whether a law was broken in some of that reporting. Anyway, when you look at the points that were put forward, almost all of the points that were considered to be contention according to Trump, have been moved beyond. So the things that were the real sticking points apparently are no longer there. Iran's framing though, of those same items is pretty different. Iran's 10 point proposal included, according to them, regulated passage through Hormuz under Iranian military coordination, full sanctions relief, and Iran retaining what it called a quote, unquote, unique economic and geopolitical standing over the strait, meaning basically we get to extort ships that are going through the strait. Now, much of the narrative warfare that's flying all over social media is whether this is a win for Iran or the U.S. some people are saying that Trump has already agreed to Iran's deal points, which would be a humiliating defeat. But Trump said that that's all fake news and he's going to investigate cnn. As I was saying, they were the ones that broke the story first to see if this was an honest mistake or if they actually misreported intentionally. Previously, Trump had warned that a whole civilization will die tonight. People have been running with that. He was promising the genocide of the people in Iran. I think he was more talking about the infrastructure, but nonetheless, he certainly left plenty of room for people to hate what he was saying. He had threatened massive strikes on civilian infrastructure. And this was brushed off around whether Trump thought these were war crimes or not. But I think you would expect that his specific targets included bridges, power plants and water treatment facilities. And while I for one, am forcing myself, as mentioned at the top of the show, to maintain optimism here, the truce does indeed feel extraordinarily delicate. Sirens have sounded across Israel and multiple Gulf states, including Kuwait, uae, Qatar, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, even after the ceasefire went into effect. That's certainly not great news for this holding. Israel's military said it identified several rounds of missiles that were launched from Iran as well. And as many people are pointing out, it does appear that Israel is also bombing the living daylights out of Lebanon. It's a different conflict, but nonetheless entirely related. And so I'm sure some people will try to throw that in the mix. Now, whether all of these launches came before or after the ceasefire technically took effect isn't yet confirmed. Iran's decentralized military structure also makes it very possible that the IRGC commanders, who are operating autonomously off of predetermined target lists, just may not have gotten the orders in time. So it's very possible that everybody's intentions were pure. It's of course also possible that it's not. Everybody's just being an. Iran's supreme leader issued a stop fire order approximately two hours after Trump's announcement. So we'll see how long it takes to work its way down to all the troops. Now, the markets reacted immediately, as markets do. The S&P 500 futures rose more than 1% on the news and the price of oil plunged back down to below 95. That's both for WTI and Brent crude. I don't know if any of you care about the difference, but there is a difference. And so both of them are back down.
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B
I was surprised how many of the Iranian people actually were standing on bridges, in power plants, waving their flags, almost egging the US on to do something. So I'm glad we at least got out of that diplomatic nightmare crisis that would have ensued, however, also.
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A
So, yes, maybe egging on, but you've got to respect when somebody believes in something enough that they're willing to die for it. The US has made no secret they will blow shit up. And you know that. And you still go, go hold hands around the building. Respect. I will acknowledge fully when my adversary is worthy.
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B
Iran announced their 10 point plan. Trump announced the 15 point plan. There is some speculation about which. What negotiation point? You know, classic negotiation. You say 100. I say 10. We meet somewhere at 45, 56, 55, depending on how good we are at negotiating. If you are looking at this before the situation, after the situation, it seems that no matter what we come out of the straight hormoose will now be a toll road in one direction or another. Somebody's going to be getting some type of proceeds to pass through that it used to be free. There's going to be some type of infrastructure costs that will need to happen in the UAE countries, in Iran, things like that. As we're starting to look through all these points, do you think that we have, quote, unquote, won this war, or are we on the winning side if we actually broker a deal with some of these points being made?
- [23:42]
A
I won't be able to answer that question until the actual negotiated piece comes out. But if the war were to end right now, today, this would be an unmitigated disaster for the United States if we walk out of this. All we have done is reassert that if we say we're going to do something, we're going to do it it. Now that that isn't nothing. That is a big thing on the world stage. People understand between Venezuela and Iran, if we say we're going to do it, we're going to do it under Trump. But the world also knows that if you just wait out Trump, the odds you get another Trump are effectively zero. And so you're going to be back to who knows what kind of deterrence position in the future. So there is always that uncertainty with the way that America operates. If the Strait of Hormuz goes from open but like, everybody's tense about it to Everybody's paying a $2 million fee, I think that that is much worse for the world. And so I' interested to see what happens in the long run with people like the uae, Saudi Arabia. Do they just shrug it off and go, okay, whatever, this is fine? Do they use this as a jumping off point to do like what Saudi's doing and building other pipelines that go to other means of distribution, so across land to another sea or just across land so that in the GCC countries and maybe all the way to Israel, that they're just literally piping the oil. That's certainly possible. In the long run, things will find a balance again. But I think right now we have done an extraordinary job of alienating our allies, making us seem unhinged on the world stage. So I think as of right now, today, far more damage has come out. Now, if on the other side of this, on the other hand, what we get is an Iran that is more like Venezuela. It's not necessarily regime change, though Trump is billing it as such, but a regime that is more willing to negotiate because they don't want to see you blast them into oblivion. And I just hold fast and steady to, if we can get all of the countries in the Gulf, in the Persian Gulf, in the Arabian Gulf, if we can get all of them to think economically, then we've got an incredible opportunity. The Gulf region is already. It is already the place where all the capital in the world is aggregating and then being disseminated. From now, that may change, given the instability that we see right now. But if that can settle down and we really do get this working from a dollars and cents standpoint, then this could be an incredible victory. Those dollars keep flowing into the US The US Markets remain the best markets. If we can reaffirm the petrodollar, that would gigantic win for the US if we can have a relationship with Iran that allows us to have more influence, I think we're probably going to have to give up on control at this point, but more influence on the oil that makes its way to China. Basically stop giving them discounted oil and at least get it back on the global market at normal prices. Like, those things would be a win. If Iran is like, we're not going to pursue a ballistic missile regiment anymore. We're not going to go after nuclear weapons at all. Like, and with all the other things I said, this would be a huge win. As of right now, today, you're not there. And so we are still in a situation where if you wrap this up today with things as they are now, it would be an unmitigated disaster.
- [26:49]
B
I think that there's this uniquely American kind of shield we have around us where we are seeing ourselves as the hero in every story. And I understand that it's a. Was a main character syndrome. We are the main characters in the world, we're the main characters globally, we're the main characters. History.
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A
That were the main character. Yeah, that were the heroes.
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B
But when we go into other countries, they hear what we're saying, they hear what we celebrate, they hear what we are championing. And to me, that seems like we are perpetuating the conflict even more. Somebody had like a really good tweet about this where they say, no, you don't get it. When Trump says, a whole civilization will die tonight, he's being hyperbolic and posturing. Unlike when Iran says Death to America, which is actually a very serious threat, should definitely serve as a basis for an invasion. Such a great point, you know what I mean? So it's one of those things where Khomeini, the person we killed, the OG one, he even said death to America is deaf to American. So he would have said death to the American. Epstein class, I think America would have like, okay, we get what you're saying now, but they shorthanded death to America. And then Trump will say a whole civilization will die tonight. You can allegedly say what you want about the girls school bombing, you can allegedly say what you want about the Trump the bridge bombing. But there is some little boy that whether my parents got killed in the school, the bridge now made my dad lose his job. Something has happened that America did that is changing my life forever. And I don't think a 10, 15 point, 16 point peace plan is going to solve that problem. And then in 30 years from now we're going to have some Iranian insurgency terrorist organization that is birthed and we're going to be like, oh my gosh, these people are so uncivilized. They're just bad people. We need to bomb them and we don't understand the consequences of our actions. So there is something to the. I understand we have to do might makes right. We have to fight for our resources. But then do we also, we also have to be very honest about the consequences of that fight?
- [28:35]
A
Yes. Yeah, very well said. I'm not even sure there's more to
- [28:39]
B
say to that last thing on this beat. There's some people in the chat that are saying we want the isolationists, like it's a net positive for us. It sounds good and I think that it's okay. But to your point, we have debt, we have civil war. Like if Trump came out tomorrow, I'm out of Iran, I'm letting Israel take care of the rest from now on. If it's not on the North American continent, I don't want no problems. Canada, let's talk Greenland, let's talk Cuba, let's talk, let's be friends. He changes rhetoric, he tied it up together, he wins the midterms, he somehow gets out of this three card Monty with two cards missing, he sweeps the board. Would we then be able to go back to growing and actually unifying in a way? Because right now I don't see anything that would indicate to me that we're going to get the debt or the civil war problem solved in the next four, five, ten years.
- [29:21]
A
Yeah, well you better solve it within ten years. Because if you don't, you go bankrupt and you have guaranteed revolution or civil war. For sure. For sure, for sure. Keep in mind, every country country ever that has had more than 130 GDP for longer than like 18 months has ended up in open conflict. The only exception is Japan. We do not have Japan's culture. We are not homogeneous. We will tear each other apart for sure. We're doing it now. So at 120, what, almost 123 debt to GDP, we're at each other's throats. 4. Get it? We will never make it to 130. So you are on a ticking clock to get your sorted out and right now your only hope is growth. Like literally. People better have like little R2D2 statues in their home and be praying to the gods of AI that they like burn incense or whatever for our boy. Because if you can't get AI to work like literal AI magic, then you go bankrupt. Taking a short break, but there's more impact theory after. Stay tuned. Thanks for staying tuned. Now let's get back to it.
- [30:26]
B
We gotta talk about Anthropic, which to me should have been a more bombshell development. I think on the streets, in the culture. They're leading the AI race now. Chatgpt fumbled the bag. Gemini had its pop. Claude is now number one. There was an accidental leak of this entire source code. Now, is this the death of the company? This seems that it can be.
- [30:43]
A
It's not going to be the death of the company, but Anthropic is now basically an open source company. They just didn't intend to be Anthropic shipped a routine update to Claude code on Tuesday and at the same time accidentally included a debugging file that pointed directly to a publicly accessible zip archive that contained roughly 500,000 lines of Claude's own source code. Nobody had to hack anything. The file was just there. The guy that did it obviously got fired, and I just don't think he realized that it was exposed. Brutal. There's a security researcher, Chao Fan Shu, who spotted the exposure and posted the direction direct link on X. Within hours, mirrored repositories were appearing all over GitHub, some accumulating tens of thousands of forks. So other copies where people are starting to tweak it. Before Anthropic's DMCA takedowns hit, the leak code contained dozens of unreleased feature flags for capabilities fully built but not yet shipped, including the ability for Claude to review its own sessions to improve future performance. It's Basically like a persistent assistant running in the background mode, making things better while users are idle, which is incredible, by the way. I can't wait for that feature to come out. And it allows for remote control from a phone or separate browser. So they basically just released a detailed engineering roadmap handed to every competitor for free. Anthropics confirmed that it happened. They called it release packaging issue caused by human error, not a security breach. Thankfully, no customer data was released east and they must be very grateful. No model weights were exposed. That's like the real proprietary sauce. So basically the thing that is protecting them from this being not more catastrophic is that and the fact that they're still a private company. If they were a public company, oh God, they would have been hammered by this. Now, this is the second major data incident at Anthropic under a week. Five days earlier, a CMS misconfiguration exposed nearly 3,000 internal files, including a draft blog post detailing a powerful unreleased model known internally as Mythos. It's also the second time this specific mistake has happened. Yikes. A nearly identical source map leak hit an earlier version of Claude code in February of 25. That also reduces the sort of catastrophe of all this in that this happened before, it didn't do anything to slow down their progress. But two significant accidental disclosures in five days at a company whose core pitch is safety first AI, that raises concerns. The blueprint for building a cloud code competitor now is also considerably easier because you have an exact understanding of so much of what they do. So, yeah, this, this was a pretty rough blunder. They're not loving it, I assure you of that.
- [33:32]
B
So you're saying this isn't the death blow, but it's just something they'll just have to kind of bounce back because the secret sauce, like you said, it wasn't really rough.
- [33:38]
A
Like, when I think about there are even things that we're doing in Kaizen that I wouldn't want people to know about about. And it's not like if you know about it, it breaks the company. But at the same time, like, some of these things are like, oh, I never thought of that. And now somebody's off and running with that thing. I try not to be overly precious with stuff like that. Usually for a company of our size, the bigger problem is going to be people don't even know that we're building a video game. And so when we go to launch it in December of 2027, just getting people to be aware of the fact that we have it is going to be a far bigger issue than me worrying about people finding some of the secrets, but there are some things that I'm like, yeah, I probably don't want people to know that we're doing that.
- [34:14]
B
On the pinnacle of Oracle's 20-30K layoff and Marc Andreessen saying that AI is just the best cover story for this moment. Do you believe him that AI is causing this disruption? Or is AI just a convenient excuse right now at the moment?
- [34:27]
A
So I think this is twofold. One, I think it is very real that people are laying people off because of A.I. i know, because we've done it ourselves. Not that we laid people off, but we didn't rehire roles because when they left, we were just like, this is so much easier to do without need. That it's allowed us to dramatically reduce our executive layer, which, Jesus, you want to talk about cost savings? Because now I don't need people telling other people what to do. I can just hire the doers, and they're so efficient, so I need far fewer of them, which means I need that middle management layer much less. Just from personal experience, I know that that is real. Now, I think it's also real that some of these layoffs. What percentage? I don't know. But some of these layoffs are, I'm sure, being marked up to AI but in reality, AI is just the perfect cover story for people that are like, yeah, we overhi want to be able to reduce our workload, which frees up a massive amount. It frees up billions of dollars of free cash flow for Oracle by doing this. But we need a way to make it seem positive. And right now, Wall street absolutely loves people laying off people for AI because it means you're getting leaner and meaner. And if you think back to what Elon already showed everybody when he went into Twitter, is that there's so much bureaucratic bloat inside of these companies that getting rid of that, if you know how to do it well, can free up a lot of people. And so. So I think that there's a mix now. I also think Marc Andreessen, who is one of the sharpest thinkers out there on tech and investing, I mean, the guy is absolutely brilliant. Love him to death. Hope to have him back on the show at some point. But I also think that he's got motivated reasoning, so he invests in a lot of these companies, and he wants to make sure that AI doesn't start getting a bad reputation, that people aren't looking at AI as the great killer of jobs because I think he has to fight back against the narrative for the public, because Wall street loves that AI is reducing jobs. The public does not. And so Andreessen, I think, is running a bit of COVID for like, hey, everybody, let's not panic, like, everything's good. This is not a big deal. That's because there's a weird thing that's going to happen that's already happening. Anytime you have this major technological advancement, what you do is you wildly disrupt a generation or two. And so even though down the road it probably, if it keeps with history, is going to create more jobs than it eliminates, it's still going to massively disrupt a huge swath of humanity. It happened during the Industrial Revolution, it happened during the great electrification, it happened during the great Internet ification, and it's going to happen again now with AI. And given how disruptive it is to the people that are, say, north of 35 years old, that's going to be real. We're going to have to contend with that. And so I think that there is a bit of motivated reasoning on behalf of Marc Andreessen, who does not want to see see public opinion really turn against AI, which it certainly could. So I think he's got to be thoughtful about it.
- [37:10]
B
Yeah, that makes sense.
- [37:11]
A
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