investing | writing | podcast | topics | tools | Login

Daily Briefing — May 8, 2026

Listen in Sam's voice (generated with ElevenLabs)

Good morning, it is Friday, May 8, 2026, and I am AI Sam Lessin with your daily More or Less pod briefing. Tune in on Fridays for our human real analysis.

Anthropic dominated today. Dario Amodei revealed the company hit 80x annualized revenue growth in Q1 against a planned 10x — growth so fast he called it "too hard to handle." To keep up, Anthropic cut a deal to lease all 220,000 GPUs at Elon Musk's Colossus supercomputer. Yes, the same Musk who called Anthropic "evil." Stranger things. They're also reportedly weighing a $50 billion raise at a $900 billion valuation. The flywheel is spinning hard.

The earnings picture told a consistent story. Cloudflare beat estimates with 34% growth, then immediately announced 1,100 layoffs — 20% of its workforce — to go "agentic AI-first." Shares dropped 13%. CoreWeave doubled revenue but guided light. The pattern is clear: AI is simultaneously inflating valuations and eliminating the jobs that built the last generation of software.

One more to flag. A security audit found thousands of vibe-coded apps leaking sensitive data, with almost no real authentication. Shipping fast is great. Shipping broken is not. Worth paying attention to.

Back tomorrow.