AI Budget Increases, Fable’s Potential, AI’s Cyber Frontier: Takeaways From Big Technology’s AI Summit
Don't expect the spending to slow down anytime soon, and more lessons from a day with the leaders of today's biggest AI companies.
Don’t expect AI’s spending frenzy to slow down anytime soon. That was perhaps the biggest lesson at the Big Technology AI Summit, held last week in San Francisco.
Within a span of a few hours, we held a month’s worth of discussions, and the consensus around spending — between infrastructure and services — was that it was only going up from here, even amid the “tokenmaxxing reckoning.”
The summit’s speakers included OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Anthropic Labs Lead Mike Krieger, Box CEO Aaron Levie, Corridor chief product officer Alex Stamos, and several other friends of the shows. Here are the day’s most resonant takeaways, including a look into the state of AI, from Fable and beyond:
Don’t Wait For Moore’s Law
The traditional “rule” that the cost of computing services comes down over time seems broken with AI. The reason is that the technology’s increasing capabilities have led companies to throw it at harder, costlier problems, said Box CEO Levie. “People get confused. They say, ‘I thought AI was supposed to be getting cheaper,’” he said. “Actually, no, we’re outrunning the efficiency improvements in our appetite for what these models can go and do.”
Levie said Box’s token consumption went up exponentially in recent years. “When we launched our first AI use case within Box, the average number of tokens that was being used on a task was like 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 tokens,” he said. “Now our latest agents might use a million tokens or 5 million tokens on executing a task.”
Current AI Policy: The Dream for The Pause AI Movement
Remember the six-month AI pause petition that went nowhere? Levie said that the current AI policy in the U.S. — where the White House seems to be reviewing and approving each new model — is effectively fulfilling the dream of the signatories. “If you had to establish a regulatory regime that said we are going to review models,” Levie said, “you would kind of need something that shocks the system into that kind of regulatory framework.”
Frontier AI Cybersecurity Capabilities: Not Just a Fable Issue
The White House put export controls on Anthropic’s latest model, but Alex Stamos, the former Meta security chief and current Corridor chief product officer, argued the real moment passed without much notice. The AI cyber breakthrough came last year with the Opus 4 and GPT-5 series models, which effectively gave human engineers superpowers. “It’s like all of a sudden you went to a high school track meet and all the kids are running Olympic times,” Stamos said. Mythos, he said, is the best public model at finding bugs. It’s just not unprecedented.
Fable Gets Things Done With Less Back And Forth
Mike Krieger, the Instagram co-founder and current Anthropic Labs lead, said Fable requires less hand-holding than its predecessors. With Fable, he said, he could hand off larger, more open-ended tasks and step away, rather than babysitting the model and going back and forth throughout. “It would do the whole thing, and then kind of hang out for the next seven hours,” Krieger said, of one project.
Compute May Be The Core Differentiator
Greg Brockman made clear that OpenAI believes it will differentiate itself, in part, by the amount of compute it accumulates. “There just is not going to be enough compute in the world to satisfy all the demand,” he said. “Right now, we’re talking about compute constraints and the number of people using these agents is — the order of 10 million, 20 million maybe — we’re not at planet scale.”
Is Unstructured Data The Key To Successful AI Deployments? (Sponsor)
Live from Hyland CommunityLIVE 2026, Hyland CEO, Jitesh S. Ghai, Chief Product Officer, Michael Campbell and Partha Srinivasa, CIO at Erie Insurance join the Big Technology Podcast to talk enterprise AI, and why unstructured data is the key to unlocking the content-powered agentic enterprise. Where AI pilots and token allotment have gone wrong for others, Hyland is helping its customers—like Erie Insurance—use their unstructured data to provide agents with the context they need to drive real business impact. Tune in to hear how Hyland enables AI deployments in healthcare, banking, insurance, and more by making unstructured data a core part of an agentic enterprise.
What Else I’m Reading, Etc.
Apple will raise prices after memory prices increase [WSJ]
OpenAI may delay its IPO until 2027 [New York Times]
The U.S. is most pessimistic about AI because of its lack of safety net [New York Times]
SpaceX stock tumbles, may drop below its IPO price [Yahoo Finance]
Rest in peace, Om Malik [Om]
This Week On Big Technology Podcast: Anthropic’s Labs Lead On Fable’s Capabilities + Building AI-Native Products — With Mike Krieger
Mike Krieger is the head of Anthropic Labs and co-founder of Instagram. Krieger joins Big Technology Podcast live from the Big Technology AI Summit to discuss what it’s like inside Anthropic the week the government forced the company to pull its frontier models, Fable and Mythos, off the market. Tune in to hear Krieger describe how working with Fable changed the way he builds — queuing up a full night of work before bed and waking to find it finished in an hour — why he insists Anthropic’s safety warnings are material rather than marketing, and how Anthropic navigates being both a platform and a product as it competes with the companies building on top of it. Wired senior correspondent Lauren Goode joins as a co-interviewer. Hit play for a rare look inside the lab from the person building Anthropic’s next breakout product.
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