Impersonal Business

The year is 2022. I sit in my room, probably watching Grey’s Anatomy or reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, when my dad calls me into the living room. “Alice,” he says, “I need to show you something.” Reluctantly, I leave the safe haven of my bed to meet my dad outside on his computer. “This,” he explains, “is ChatGPT. And it is literally about to change your life.” 

The year is 2025. I am sitting in my room, probably working on some debate prep or drilling my Latin vocabulary, when my dad calls me into the living room. “Alice,” he says, “I need to show you something.” Reluctantly, I leave the safe haven of my bed to go meet my dad outside on his computer. “This,” he explains, “is ClaudeCode. And it is literally about to change your life.” 

Over the past four years, I’ve seen how AI has changed the scope of what students, businesses, and society seem to be capable of. AI has changed at an unprecedented and somewhat unimaginable rate compared to any other technology, and with it have come new ways of running startups, hospitals, schools, and even our day-to-day lives. For us, high school students, it’s easy to feel the effects of our rapidly changing world in relatively small ways. Maybe it’s asking for help for a project, generating images, or doomscrolling and watching what is colloquially known as “AI slop.” But as the fastest-growing product in human history, the scariest part about the effects of AI is that we don’t fully know or understand what it is. 

Anthropic announced its partnership with Elon Musk for the use of his cluster of data centers called the Colossus, which are based in Memphis, on May 6th, 2026. Musk developed the Colossus for his AI company, xAI, with their main product being the large language model (LLM) Grok. Musk was able to build all these data centers earlier than anyone else, making them an extremely valuable, and now underutilized (because of Grok’s lack of user base) resource. Data centers are the physical infrastructure that makes large-scale AI work—housing equipment, GPUs, and CPUs, and using huge amounts of power and water to make sure the application on 77 percent of all computing devices—an LLM—works effectively. There are two main obstacles big AI companies have to face when thinking about data centers—the immense cost to build the infrastructure, and the limited space that comes with it. This makes data centers a finite commodity for any AI company. Furthermore, the number of data centers needed grows linearly with a company’s growth: the more you grow, the more power you need. That means that whoever controls the most data centers has fundamental power in the AI space. 

The May 6 announcement signaled to the world that Anthropic was the rising star in the AI space. At an 80x growth rate for the first quarter of 2026, Anthropic’s growth tells a distinct story—one of rising to power after being the underdog. OpenAI not only launched first, but it did so with a specific strategy—consumer first. That allowed them not only to develop as a household name, but also as colloquial language. My friends will still “chat” something, even if they’re using Claude or Gemini. Anthropic, however, focused on profitable corporate clients, and as a result, more advanced forms of AI usage (ClaudeCode, for example). Anthropic is growing at a faster rate than the physical infrastructure of the world itself can keep up with, a fact that—although exciting—seems to many, dystopian.

Musk and Anthropic’s deal represents the final nail in the coffin of a story we’ve been seeing for centuries—business becoming less personal and relational, and more transactional. Mere months before becoming the overlord of their infrastructure, Musk openly stated that Anthropic was “evil” and “hates Western civilization.” In the world of AI, new technology is so powerful that morals and good business partnerships go out the window, and business feels more transactional than ever before. And for Anthropic, a company founded on the basis of being safer and more ethical than its counterparts in the AI space, it feels counterproductive. But the blame doesn’t fall on Anthropic: their hands were tied, and they didn’t have a way out of the deal while still keeping their company operating. The real problem is that our most influential piece of technology in the world is run by billionaires who actively and outwardly dislike each other, but are the only people who can interact in the AI space. 

Principally, this approach to business is history’s way of repeating itself. When farming shifted from hand-grown crops to a seed drill, clothing shifted from being handmade to being manufactured by a huge machine; it all represents the same story: the personality being removed from businesses and ventures. Industry used to feel deeply personal: whether it be a story you get from a handmade shopkeeper or a newspaper article on a partnership between two brothers, business ideas come from personal experiences. But when we remove the personality from business, it becomes profoundly sterile. Partnering with a business partner you have openly called evil represents a shift away from morals and a shift away from business being personal. 

But this isn’t all bad. There’s a different and equally important story to be told here: one of moving toward the common good, regardless of opinions. The separation of personal thoughts from ventures when we talk about the most influential technology ever is a good thing because it allows people who are unethical, and who know one another are unethical as well, to unite under the hope of a common good. And while I’m not saying that we’ll see this with OpenAI and Anthropic, being able to give resources to a company you disagree with because you see what they are doing for the world is, in a sense, honorable. AI is a tool with so much transformative potential that some ethical standards going out the window can be a good thing—as long as it doesn’t go too far.