Apple's Hail Mary, Anthropic's Savior

Look, do I realistically think Apple is going to buy Anthropic? I mean, no. It would be by far the largest M&A deal of all time – undoubtedly more than double the next largest deal,¹ and certainly more than triple the recently insanely large (and insanely leveraged) Paramount Skydance/Warner Bros Discovery deal. Anthropic is currently valued at $380B. Apple's largest deal ever was two orders of magnitude below that. And that deal, Beats, was done over a decade ago.² This is simply not a deal that Apple – or probably anyone – does in a normal environment.

But we're not in a normal environment...