On theCUBE Pod: Anthropic wrestles with Trump, SaaSpocalpyse grows

Tech collided with politics again this week when the U.S. Defense Department threatened to cut its contracts with Anthropic.

Now branded as a “woke” company by Trump, Anthropic risks ceding ground to OpenAI because CEO Dario Amodei doesn’t want the government to use AI for surveilling the population and autonomous weapons systems. If that sounds a bit dystopian, you’re not alone.

“According to my sources in Washington, the deal is that [Amodei] wants the government in the loop on all AI,” said John Furrier (right), executive analyst for theCUBE Research. “No autonomous. And when asked, my source said … [Amodei] says, ‘I know how powerful it is and I don’t want to sell it.’ And who do you trust here? I think I trust Dario on this one.”

On the latest episode of theCUBE Pod, Furrier and Dave Vellante (left), chief analyst for theCUBE Research, discussed the battle between Anthropic and OpenAI. They also talked about the so-called “SaaSpocalypse” and why Wall Street is down on AI.

White House tips the scales in favor of OpenAI over Anthropic

Anthropic would prefer the Defense Department not use its models to autonomously kill people. Pete Hegseth apparently feels differently. The company’s clash with the Pentagon reflects just how much AI capabilities are starting to impact the general public.

“I like the way [Nvidia Corp. CEO] Jensen phrased it,” Vellante said. “You want AI in the loop. And to me that is the right model. You got humans that are using AI, not the other way around. Automation is always problematic.”

Meanwhile, Palantir is living up to the name with its surveillance technology, and OpenAI is poised to walk in and take Anthropic’s government contracts — despite CEO Sam Altman having the same concerns as Amodei. OpenAI also raised $50 billion from Amazon, showing that the AI cash flow isn’t slowing any time soon.

“[Amazon] looks at OpenAI as just another successful ecosystem partner,” Furrier said. “Of course, they’re investing $50 billion into it, but that’s going to cover a lot of CapEx. And they get the number one training model working on Trainium. And they’ve got Anthropic on enterprise. So, brilliance on [AWS’ part].”

The SaaSpocalypse widens but fears abate

Worries about the death of software-as-a-service companies have started to ebb, but the market is still experiencing trillions of dollars in loss. SaaS companies will need to adapt or die, according to Furrier, who brought up the iPod vs. iPhone comparison again.

“The SaaSpocalpyse is still happening,” he said. “If you look at the loss of value for SaaS companies, the total’s mounting close to 1.5 trillion and counting. Yet … you got literally hundreds of dollars just from OpenAI, AWS, Google, AMD, Nvidia around that. So, you’ve got the SaaS implosion and you’ve got the AI infrastructure tsunami of investments.”

Hiring is no longer the biggest sign of growth, Furrier pointed out, as companies use AI to improve efficiency — by laying off employees. Salesforce and ServiceNow both ended up partnering with OpenAI instead of making their own models, a sign that these companies are staying abreast of the times.

“A big part of the SaaSpocalypse right now is seat-based pricing doesn’t apply to the AI era,” Vellante said. “It’s going to be outcome-based pricing. Right now, it’s basically like cell phone minutes or gigabytes, it’s like tokens. It’s really confusing right now — how the pricing’s going to show up. But, I still believe that Salesforce and Benioff is a company that’s going to make it through.”

Dell comes out on top in difficult week for tech stocks

In the market this week, earnings are up and stocks are down. Nvidia delivered solid fourth-quarter results across the board, but the stock dipped more than 4% in midday trading Thursday. Workday Inc.’s stock slumped again. The only company to emerge unscathed is Dell Technologies, which had a fantastic quarter.

“[Dell]’s got this business model … everybody would love to have it but nobody wants to attack it,” Vellante said. “The moat is the business model itself. Imagine when storage kicks in, and imagine if the PC cycle kicks in and AI server growth continues. We’ve never seen Dell on all fronts fire like that. Plus they send so much cash back to their shareholders through repurchase, stock repurchases and dividends.”

This week sees theCUBE reconvene at MWC 2026 in Barcelona, where experts and analysts will gather to discuss how agentic AI is impacting mobile connectivity.

Watch the full podcast below to find out why these industry pros were mentioned:

Andy Jassy, president and CEO at Amazon.com
Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO at OpenAI
Matt Garman, CEO at Amazon Web Services
Jensen Huang, president, co-founder and CEO at Nvidia
Charlie Kawwas, president of Broadcom
Donald Trump, 47th president of the United States of America
Jeff Bezos, chairman of Amazon.com
Dario Amodei, CEO at Anthropic
Pete Hegseth, United States Secretary of War
Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies
Jack Dorsey, CEO of Square
Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO and chairman of Apple
George Gilbert, principal analyst at theCUBE Research
Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO at Microsoft
Marc Benioff, chair and CEO at Salesforce
Michael Dell, chairman and CEO at Dell Technologies
Jeremy Burton, CEO at Observe
Jim Cramer, investment pro and TV personality
Carl Eschenbach, co-CEO at Workday
Frank Fay, business development and customer success at News Media
Jim Zemlin, executive director of Linux Foundation
Raphaelle d’Ornano, founder and CIO at Decoding Discontinuity

Here’s the full episode of this week’s theCUBE Pod:

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Photo: News