Hello, and welcome back to Dry Powder. I’m Bill Cohan, with one more from the road before I’m back in your inbox full-time.

Today, my colleagues Dylan Byers and Julia Alexander have secured a conversation with Chris Lehane, the legendary political knife-fighter turned policy chief who helped orchestrate OpenAI’s eyebrow-raising, nine-figure acquisition of TBPN. It’s hard to discern the strategic logic behind Sam Altman’s decision to acquire a niche digital talk show at a moment when his $850 billion enterprise faces far more consequential challenges. (Then there’s the fallout from last week’s unflattering New Yorker profile…) But Lehane offers an explanation—even if it’s not one the media industry wants. More on all that below, and I’ll be back on Wednesday.

Also mentioned in this issue: Brendan Carr, Krishna Rao, John Coogan, Jordi Hays, Donald Trump, Ben Thompson, Cody Campbell, Steve Jobs, Mike Lee, Dylan Abruscato, Ronnie Chatterji, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Dario Amodei, and more…

But first…

Ian Krietzberg

Anthropic’s exponential run rate: Shortly before revealing its mysterious Mythos model, the Anthropic press shop announced an expanded partnership with Google and Broadcom for “multiple gigawatts of next-generation T.P.U. capacity” that’ll come online in 2027. According to C.F.O. Krishna Rao, this expansion of Anthropic’s compute infrastructure is a “disciplined” response to “unprecedented” and “exponential” growth. As a case in point, Anthropic disclosed that its run-rate revenue has now surpassed $30 billion—a pretty significant jump from the $9 billion it reported at the end of 2025. (Run rate, the industry’s preferred metric, is typically calculated by multiplying the previous month’s revenue by 12, so take that with a grain of salt.) Google, of course, was one of Anthropic’s earliest hyperscale investors, as well as a leading purveyor of T.P.U. compute-as-a-service. The deal is another shining example of the circular financing that powers the industry, where investors are also cloud providers and startups double as the cloud providers’ largest customers.

John Ourand

The NFL’s new antitrust nightmare: Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the D.O.J. has opened an investigation into the NFL’s increasing reliance on streamers—and whether the league has violated the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961. For those requiring a refresher on telecom history: The S.B.A. is the federal antitrust exemption that allows football to negotiate leaguewide deals with broadcasters, among other carve-outs. The news of the inquiry comes after several months of public nitpicking from F.C.C. chair Brendan Carr and rising tensions surrounding the league’s attempts to strong-arm new, astronomically expensive media rights deals with current partners ahead of schedule. (As you’ll recall, the Journal’s editorial page wondered whether the S.B.A. had outlived its usefulness.)

Obviously, the stakes are high. But what’s particularly interesting is how different camps are pushing radically different solutions: The D.O.J. probe was pushed by Sen. Mike Lee, who seems inclined to phase out the S.B.A. on the professional side. Then you have Texas Tech activist booster Cody Campbell, who wants it expanded on the college side. (Remember that this all comes a few weeks after President Trump hosted a symposium designed to fix college sports, a prelude to a mostly toothless executive order called “Urgent National Action to Save College Sports.”) The billion-dollar question: Will Congress be sophisticated enough to fully understand all of these competing interests?

And now, over to Dylan and Julia…

The Lehane Asylum

A genuinely intelligent conversation with OpenAI policy chief Chris Lehane, who led last week’s acquisition of TBPN. Here, he explains the marketing value of his new podcast, its supposed independence, and Sam Altman’s trust issues.

Dylan Byers

When OpenAI announced its recent nine-figure acquisition of TBPN, the Millennial tech-business talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, even the industry’s smartest analysts had a tough time making sense of the deal. Of course, no one questioned John and Jordi’s decision to take the money, even if it was almost certainly more stock than cash. But why did Sam Altman’s $850 billion A.I. giant need a digital talk show—particularly so soon after pledging to abandon “side quests” and focus on the core objective of, ya know, winning the A.I. race and revolutionizing the world?

Some saw it as a vanity project, others as the latest evidence—after Sora, the Pentagon partnership, etcetera—of Altman & Co.’s penchant for placing bad bets. “It’s simply a deal that makes no sense,” wrote Ben Thompson, the reliably insightful tech analyst and author of Stratechery. “What exactly is OpenAI getting by owning TBPN that it wasn’t getting before? … TBPN already exists and, by all accounts, was making money, so why does OpenAI need to own it?”

To answer those questions, I turned to Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, who engineered the deal and will be John and Jordi’s new boss. Chris is the legendary political operative who made his name as a combative crisis manager in the Clinton White House, then parlayed his “master of disaster” persona into a high-powered advisory career, working with companies like Airbnb, Uber, and Netflix on policy, communications, and regulatory strategy. For the last two years, he’s been executing that same playbook for OpenAI.

So… how does TBPN fit into that playbook? In a conversation with me and my partner Julia Alexander on The Grill Room, Chris explained that it’s all about owning the narrative. By scaling TBPN, OpenAI hopes to both expand “the A.I.-curious audience” while also leveraging John and Jordi as an in-house marketing team, much as Steve Jobs once worked with Chiat/Day. “We tend to communicate in a very A.I.-researcher language [that’s] really hard to understand,” Chris told us. “We need to get a lot better at actually telling people why this is going to be important and good for them.”

Herewith, some highlights from our discussion with Chris, lightly edited for length and clarity. Those interested in hearing the entire interview, as well as our interview with TBPN president Dylan Abruscato, can do so here.

A High-Signal Audience

Dylan Byers: Why does OpenAI want to own TBPN? What’s the thesis?

Chris Lehane: There’s a couple of different levels to this. First and foremost, Jordi, John, and their whole team are incredibly good at unpacking the ideas behind technology and specifically A.I.—the proverbial why and the how. I remember listening to them when we released o1. We put out an explanation describing it, but then I listened to their show. They did a better job than I think we did at actually explaining it and translating it. Now, they were explaining it and translating it to a high-signal, Silicon Valley “opinion elite” audience… but they did a really good job of actually translating why it was important and what the big ideas were behind it. What they really do is break down the ideas behind the news.

The second part of that is, can we scale that particular audience while maintaining the quality and quantity? Their core audience is roughly 70,000 high-signal people that really tune in on a daily basis. But there is a larger audience out there that is really A.I. curious and A.I. interested.

The third point is [marketing]. There have been a lot of analogies drawn to Microsoft and MSNBC, Bloomberg LLP and Bloomberg Media, Westinghouse and CBS, GE and NBC. The more apt analogy here is when Apple brought in Chiat/Day and created an in-house agency that became the Apple Media Lab. In an age where content is the most important piece, bringing them in as the equivalent of a marketing agency for this era and this audience is an incredibly important aspect for us.

Dylan: But why does OpenAI need to be the one to scale this? Why spend this money?

We are at a moment when there is a much broader and growing interest in understanding the how and the why behind A.I. The 70,000 people they hit right now are incredibly important, but imagine if it’s a much bigger audience—and that does take resources.

The second part is this aspect of bringing in an agency. You’re able to connect these folks who can do an incredibly good job of explaining things with a massive distribution channel that we can uniquely tap into. Put those together and you can start to see some really interesting opportunities.

And look, I never want to diminish costs or anything like that. We just went through a $122 billion raise—the largest in history. Getting your head around the scale and scope of this technology, how transformative it is—this is not just your normal, highly successful startup; this is an entirely different sort of animal. People spend enormous amounts of money on their marketing agencies. We’re bringing that capacity in-house with expertise in terms of how people actually communicate—particularly A.I. users.

Dylan: Is this a one-off—or a template for how tech companies will think about media going forward?

I do think we’ve seen technology platforms begin to really think about this. You look at how Netflix has changed how they put information out right from their platform. When I was at Airbnb, we used our audience as a distribution channel where we would communicate with them right through the platform. We were among the first to really use the actual distribution channel of the platform itself to do our big product launches. And why not? At OpenAI, we have a much bigger audience than all the traditional conventional media companies added together.

I think in the age that we are in, content is king. I just think we need to understand and recognize that we’re not in a time period anymore where you’re just speaking passively through paid advertising, or putting out an announcement in a blog or an old-school press conference or launch event. It’s a totally different world right now.

Declaration of Independence

Julia Alexander: What kinds of media or digital products will OpenAI build around this?

You should expect us to be building out some compelling and interesting franchises of our own. Over the last year, we brought on a chief economist, Ronnie Chatterji, and did a series of physical OpenAI economic events. We’ll be opening a space in Washington, D.C., called the A.I. Workshop, which we’re thinking of as an A.I. laboratory of democracy. You could see creating an entire content series around that. We have something called the Forum, which has an A.I.-native audience of around 70,000 to 90,000 on a daily basis and is primarily a venue for developers and builders. We do something called “A.I. Academies,” tutorial modules for small businesses. We’ve been doing a lot of, in effect, beta tests of concepts that we could really build out, particularly as we approach a billion users. There’s just a big distribution network out there.

Julia: How do you maintain editorial independence while also using TBPN as part of a broader strategy? How does that not create a problem for guests like Zuck, Dario, potentially Elon, who don’t want to participate in an OpenAI marketing machine?

I’m gonna give a little bit of a wiseass answer and then I’ll give a serious answer. The wiseass part of it begins with the fact that Elon owns this thing called Twitter. All those people you just named are on Twitter. They seem to be comfortable being on Twitter. So like, I do think that that has a little bit been asked and answered. If you have a platform that seems to be very effective as a place to go and share your content and information, you’re gonna go on there.

The more serious answer: We do have an editorial-independence commitment that was built into the contract. It’s a very specific provision. This [deal] only works if they’re able to maintain their editorial independence. I have a lot of faith and confidence that that will be the case.

Dylan: And how do you win the broader narrative battle around Sam Altman? Elon Musk is trying to kick the shit out of him every day. There’s a New Yorker story this week saying he can’t be trusted. How do you convince the world that Sam is not the person that people are starting to depict him to be?

OpenAI, under Sam, has a very specific mission and purpose: to ultimately build A.G.I. that benefits all of humanity. And under Sam, OpenAI has led the effort to democratize access to this incredibly powerful technology so as many people as possible can participate in it. We have nearly a billion people who are using this on a regular basis and the vast, vast majority of them are using it for free. We’re able to do that because Sam put in place a very different structure. We are a not-for-profit that oversees a public benefit corporation—the public effectively owns a big chunk of this through the nonprofit.

I also think you can judge someone’s character by who they are willing to stand up to and against. And right now there is a real battle, maybe even a fight going on, between Sam and Elon and Mark Zuckerberg, and I think the fact that Sam is taking both of those folks on speaks for itself.

There really is this “people versus the powerful” dynamic that is taking place. It shouldn’t just be one person. Ultimately, this does need to be done through the small-d democratic process. We are the democratic platform out there. And we are trying to work through the democratic process to actually put these values in at the front end. I think you look at the actions, and those actions matter a hell of a lot more than words.

Join Puck’s chief political columnist, John Heilemann, as he roams the corridors of power and influence in America on this twice-weekly interview show, taking you beyond the headlines with the people who shape our culture: icons and up-and-comers, incumbents and insurgents, moguls and machers in the overlapping worlds of politics, entertainment, tech, business, sports, media, and beyond. The conversations are rich and revealing, unrehearsed and unexpected… and reliably impolitic. A Puck-Audacy joint, new episodes drop every Wednesday and Friday.

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