The entire direction of the US stock market hinges on whether OpenAI and Anthropic can maintain their growth trajectory in the face of open-weight competition.
Rory identifies the single most important question in AI markets: can the foundation model companies maintain their ~10x growth rates? If yes, all the hyperscaler capex commitments are justified and everything works. If growth slows to 2-3x, there's a massive market dislocation because all hyperscaler RPO commitments predicate on those growth projections. ✦ AI generated
Rory · 20VC · 2026-07-23 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 44:02
“will open impact that trajectory for anthropic and open AI in the next 1 to two years”
if those enterprise models if those openweight models really impacted the growth rate of anthropic and open AI Then obviously when your 80% customer slows down it would have a significant impact on your growth rate right but you know if it's any consolation Harry if that happens worrying about your merur valuation will be the least thing people are worried about because you'll see an implosion of much bigger market cap entities right and you that's that frankly is the billion dollar question you know can these two foundation models maintain their growth trajectory which is starting to become profitable at least in the case of open of entropic in the face of all this openw weight competition in the face of this push back um on costs and basically kind of push for ROI if they can maintain this trajectory for even another one or two years then everything's fine and everyone's fine and right now the data says they are if you start to see slowdown on those two ARR growth rates then you know all bets are off because the pressure because the amount of commitments they've made assuming that 10x growth rate continues will mean that even if it slips to a 2 or 3x growth rate there's going to be a mad scramble
verbatim transcript · starts at 44:02
44:02enterprise models if these openweight models really impacted the growth rate of anthropic and open AI Then obviously when your 80% customer slows down it would have a significant impact on your growth rate right but you know if it's any consolation Harry if that happens worrying about your merur valuation will be the least thing people are worried about because you'll see an implosion of much bigger market cap entities right
44:25and you that's that frankly is the billion dollar question you know can these two foundation models maintain their growth trajectory which is starting to become profitable at least in the case of open of entropic in the face of all this openw weight competition in the face of this push back um on costs and basically kind of push for ROI if they can maintain this trajectory for even another one or two
44:52years then everything's fine and everyone's fine and right now the data says they are if you start to see slowdown on those two ARR growth rates then you know all bets are off because the pressure because the amount of commitments they've made assuming that 10x growth rate continues will mean that even if it slips to a 2 or 3x growth rate there's going to be a mad scramble
45:17bets on yes or no answer will open impact that trajectory for anthropic and open AI in the next 1 to two years >> yes Harry it will impact it might impact at 1% or 50% what you're really saying what the question you're really trying to ask is does it produce a sustain you know does it reduce that growth growth rate to sub 100% within one or two
45:39years. Right? And the answer to that question is I genuinely don't know. And if I did, I'd be trading that stock. Because if let me be clear, if you know the answer to that question, that one question, you know the answer to the entire direction of the US stock market for the next two years because all the hyperscala RPO, all of it is a function of the commitments they've gotten from
46:00the the hype from the foundation model companies. And yeah, you can say if the open models, open weight models explode, there will be demand for inference. And yeah, you will have this kind of transition from oh, I sold it to open AAI but I should have sold it to um I don't know cursor or B base 10 or someone else and the capex will get repurposed, but it will be a big ass
46:24dislocation and I just genuinely don't know. I mean it's the million-dollar question. >> I think the tough the really tough part I mean it's Captain Obvious, right? is uh can they afford for it not to? And what I mean is look at what's happened with Fable this week. Okay, Fable went from you can't use it, it's not secure. Then the government let you use it. Then hey, we're going to turn it off except
46:44for variable usage on June July 15th. Now it can be 50% of your whole usage for the month. Why did they change when they don't even have enough capacity to serve it? Competition, right? Competition, right? So it if listen if they price Fable at sonnet rates I think they'll own the market. >> Yes, >> I'm oversimplifying because you don't need fable for anything but literally so the question is can can they afford to