In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Oct 21, 2026 · 43m · 35m saved
With Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google (2001-2011)
Photo: Guillaume Paumier, CC BY 3.0 via Wikipedia
Google once set the record for revenue growth. Eric Schmidt, its CEO from 2001 to 2011, told Nicolai Tangen on In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen that Anthropic has since broken that record at more than twice the speed.
Plenty of investors call AI a bubble. Eric's evidence against it is the same as his evidence for its size: real customers paying real money, and competition more brutal than PC against Mac or Android against iPhone.
"We're living in a piece of history that people will write about for a thousand years... It's the development of nonhuman intelligence." — Eric Schmidt
Eric has lived through every platform shift since the mainframe and ran Google through the internet and early mobile years, so he is measuring this one against the ones he managed.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 43 minutes of audio, 8 minutes of reading.
Here are the 10 arguments that matter.
Key Takeaways
Anthropic's revenue growth broke the record Google set under Eric, at more than twice the speed
Most companies will not make the culture changes that AI-driven flattening requires
A friend who cut 20% of his coordination staff got death threats
Genuine new discovery by AI is still 5 to 10 years away, in Eric's estimate
Europe regulates before it innovates, while the US strategy was to run as fast as possible
Chinese models are about six months behind, but free products could still win most of the world
Open-weight models can have their guardrails stripped, and Eric does not know how to solve that
Eric's biggest professional error was letting Google's early lead in social media slip
1. The Biggest Wave Yet
Eric places AI in a line of industry-defining shifts he has lived through: the mainframe, the PC, the internet, social media and now AI. He calls this one the largest because it touches everything, and points to how brutal the competition has become as proof of its size.
Anthropic's growth is Eric's main evidence that AI is not a bubble
"If you look at Anthropic's revenue growth, when I was CEO at Google, we set the revenue growth record. They smashed it, more than twice the speed as we did." — Eric Schmidt
The difference from a bubble, in his view, is that real customers are paying for real value.
