Tokenmaxxing, OpenAI's shopping spree, and the AI Anxiety Gap

The gap between AI insiders and everyone else is widening (techcrunch.com/2026/04/13/stanford-report-high…), and the spending, suspicion, and even new vocabulary are starting to show it. While OpenAI is busy buying up everything from finance apps (techcrunch.com/2026/04/13/openai-has-bought-ai…) to talk shows (techcrunch.com/2026/04/02/openai-acquires-tbpn…), a certain shoe company just rebranded as an AI infrastructure play (techcrunch.com/2026/04/15/after-sale-of-its-sh…), and Anthropic unveiled a model it says is too powerful to release publicly ... (techcrunch.com/2026/04/14/anthropic-co-founder…)but apparently not too powerful to demo to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity (techcrunch.com/podcasts/equity) podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into what's actually being built in AI infrastructure, who's winning the enterprise battle between OpenAI and Anthropic, and more of the week's headlines.

Listen to the full episode to hear about:

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Why chipmakers AMD, Arm, and Qualcomm just piled $60M into UK self-driving startup Wayve (techcrunch.com/2026/04/15/chipmakers-amd-arm-a…), and what Uber's $300M milestone bid says about who's winning the AV race

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How data center startup Fluidstack is positioning itself for the frontier labs, including a reported $50B agreement with Anthropic (techcrunch.com/2026/04/14/ai-datacenter-startu…)

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What Claude Code's moment at the HumanX conference (techcrunch.com/2026/04/12/at-the-humanx-confer…) reveals about where the OpenAI vs. Anthropic rivalry is actually playing out

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Why techcrunch.com/2026/04/15/reid-hoffman-weighs-…, and Meta's leaked internal leaderboard, might say more about optics than actual productivity

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube (youtube.com/@TechCrunch),Apple Podcasts (itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1215439780),Overcast (overcast.fm/itunes1215439780/equity),Spotify (open.spotify.com/show/5IEYLip3eDppcOmy5DmphC?s…) and all the casts. You also can follow Equity onX (twitter.com/EquityPod) andThreads (threads.net/@equitypod), at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:25 Allbirds is now an AI company, apparently

04:48 Why chipmakers are betting on Wayve

12:01 Fluidstack wants $1B to build AI data centers

16:24 OpenAI buys a finance app and a talk show

21:27 Anthropic vs. OpenAI in enterprise

24:15 The Anthropic model they won't release to the public

26:47 Why AI feels so distant to everyone else

30:47 What even is tokenmaxxing?

34:49 Parasail's $32M bet on cheaper AI inference

36:39 Outro

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