Andy Bryant

Chief Strategy Officer @horizenlabs. Building businesses out of zero-knowledge (ZK) cryptography and AI.

[Andy Bryant @AndyJBryant]

/goal invent computronium

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔Sam Altman says OpenAI's top internal user burns 100 billion tokens per month. Six years ago that number was 100,000. An external customer uses even more. Cost complaints are now the second most frequent issue he hears from clients. And his next move is "always on" AI that runs autonomously in the background, which would multiply consumption far beyond current levels. Altman shared this during a livestream on enterprise AI adoption covered by Axios.

My Take
Altman just described a future where consumption goes up by orders of magnitude while his customers are already asking how to bring the bill down. Those two things can't coexist for long. GitHub Copilot switched to token billing two days ago and users burned through a month of credits in hours. Ramp data already shows Anthropic passing OpenAI in enterprise spend, which means the competition for these customers is heating up at the exact moment the customers are pushing back on cost.

IBM's CEO said this week the industry needs $6 to $8 trillion in capex and the revenue to justify it probably doesn't exist. Altman is previewing autonomous agents that would multiply current token consumption without anyone requesting it. Either the cost per token drops fast enough to make that affordable, or enterprises start capping their AI spend. One customer already exceeds 100 billion tokens a month. Scale that across autonomous agents at every enterprise and nobody has budgeted for what comes next. Altman is selling a vision of infinite demand while admitting the customers paying for current demand are already flinching at the price.

Hedgie🤗

[Andy Bryant @AndyJBryant]

Many people make this comparison with Y2K as if it's a "one and done" migration, but the reality is that it's going to be cat-and-mouse for a few years, with advances in new threats and new defences requiring companies to hot-swap patches and libraries on a regular basis. It's not one-and-done. They are calling this requirement "Crypto Agility".

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔GitHub Copilot switched to token-based billing this morning and users are already out of credits. Pro+ subscribers paying $39 a month are reporting 60% of their credits gone in two hours of normal use. One user lost 20% of their allowance from a single file review with no code changes. Another hit their monthly cap before the calendar even flipped to June.
Orgs with shared token pools have no way to see individual usage, so entire teams get cut off when one person runs a heavy prompt. Users are canceling and moving to Claude Code and Codex. GitHub community forums are on fire.

My Take
Flat-rate AI subscriptions were always subsidized. Everyone in the industry knew it. Today the subsidy ran out for a few million developers at once. The problem is a lot of companies already restructured around these tools. They cut headcount and told remaining engineers to lean on Copilot instead of building skills internally. Those companies now depend on a tool whose cost just became unpredictable and whose usefulness completely changes when you have to ration prompts to stay under budget.

The developers moving to Claude Code and Codex will hit the same wall eventually. Every AI provider faces the same unit economics. Anthropic filed its S-1 this morning, and the durability of its revenue depends on whether customers stick around once real pricing kicks in everywhere. If a $39 subscriber cancels after one day because the tool became unusable, multiply that across millions of seats and the churn risk becomes very real.

Today showed what happens when AI pricing meets reality. The companies that built their workflows around cheap tokens just discovered the tokens aren't cheap anymore and the people who knew how to do the work without them are already gone.

Hedgie🤗

[Andy Bryant @AndyJBryant]

Not Every Organization Needs a CBOM - Here's How to Tell https://t.co/3nSutDhdzw

[Andy Bryant @AndyJBryant]

@CNBC His Bob Mortimer transformation arc is proceeding nicely

[Polemic Paine @PolemicTMM]

Today's post-

The 21 Stages of a Potato Price Cap.
https://t.co/TVxiL4qvAW

Rachel Reeves has announced that she wants to cap the prices supermarkets can charge for basics. Using the humble potato as an example, I present the 21 stages of a potato price cap.

The first 7 here, the full 21 in the post

[Andy Bryant @AndyJBryant]

Data at Rest vs. Data in Transit: Why Both Need Quantum-Resistant Protection
https://t.co/M6xVbL4iFW

[Andy Bryant @AndyJBryant]

Why 2029 is the New 2035: Three Signals That Should End the Wait-and-See Approach to Quantum Security https://t.co/cFWfXWU3Dv

[will (in sf rn) @ItsWillHenry]

Second-time Founders is my favourite gender :

1) no deck until someone asks three times

2) first hire is a lawyer

3) distribution for the product before the product exists

4) "we don't need a big round" and means it this time

5) replies to every customer email personally because they know what ignoring customers cost them last time

6) sleeps 8 hours and ships faster than everyone else

7) the only person in the room who isn't impressed by the term sheet

Second-time founders are the best breed of founders

[Merryn Somerset Webb @MerrynSW]

The U.K. explained in two headlines.

[Andy Bryant @AndyJBryant]

Questions boards should be asking management around quantum security and resilience, according to @PwC

• What is our timeline and plan for transitioning to quantum-safe cryptography?

• What is our strategy to inventory our cryptographic footprint—across applications and physical infrastructure—to pinpoint critical assets that could be exposed if encryption is broken?

• As we modernize for AI workloads, how are we confirming that new hardware, devices, and connected endpoints can support post-quantum encryption?

• Are we designing for crypto agility so we can replace cryptographic methods without major infrastructure rebuilds?

• How are we determining if our ecosystem (vendors, partners, cloud providers) is also quantum-ready?

[Fin Moorhouse @finmoorhouse]

The hyperscalers have already outspent the most famous US megaprojects

[Andy Bryant @AndyJBryant]

There's your X feed and then there's the reality

[Moti - marooned 〽️ @marooned_otc]

https://t.co/6TJmlsWqOV

[Andy Bryant @AndyJBryant]

Another expert who changed his mind recently about the urgency of PQ migration..

Heather Adkins and Sophie Schmieg are telling us that “quantum frontiers may be closer than they appear” and that 2029 is their deadline. That’s in 33 months, and no one had set such an aggressive timeline until this month.

https://t.co/V3BTVhwxTn

[Andy Bryant @AndyJBryant]

BTW, crypto or non-crypto, EVERYONE needs to upgrade to post-quantum algorithms.

I'm astonished how many folks still aren't thinking about this.

[CZ 🔶 BNB @cz_binance]

Saw some people panicking or asking about quantum computing's impact on crypto.
At a high level, all crypto has to do is to upgrade to Quantum-Resistant (Post-Quantum) Algorithms. So, no need to panic. 😂

In practice, there are some execution considerations. It's hard to organize upgrades in a decentralized world. There will likely be many debates on which algorithm(s) to use, resulting in some forks.

And some dead project may not upgrade at all. Might be a good to cleanse out those projects anyway.

New code may introduce other bugs or security issues in the short term.

People who self custody will have to migrate their coins to new wallets.

This brings to the question of Satoshi's bitcoins. If those coins move, then it means he/she is still around, which is interesting to know. If they don't move (in a certain period of time), it might be better to lock (or effectively burn) those addresses so that they don't go to the first hacker who cracks it. There is also the difficulty of identifying all his addresses, and not confuse with some old hodlers. Anyway, it's a different topic for later.

Fundamentally:

It's always easier to encrypt than decrypt.

More computing power is always good.

Crypto will stay, post quantum.

[Horizen Labs @HorizenLabs]

Meta recently had an AI agent go rogue internally. It posted responses without permission, gave bad advice, and exposed sensitive company and user data.

Rated Sev 1; their second-highest severity.

This wasn't a startup demo. This was production, inside Meta.

[Andy Bryant @AndyJBryant]

Almost my whole timeline now are just posts that read like this:

"Oh [expletive], someone [else] just launched [thing] that does [all the things]. See link in comment."

Kinda looking forward to this phase being over tbh.

[Andy Bryant @AndyJBryant]

@aakashgupta Shameless plug but we just launched a ultra-secure sandbox with stronger isolation than containers alone, just for this reason.

https://t.co/l2UIrqgTFf

[Andy Bryant @AndyJBryant]

Claude has a habit of just straight up ignoring your security measures. At @HorizenLabs we also caught it working around Claude sandbox and even Docker sandbox!

So we released Multipass sandbox to the general public! A truly isolated VM - try it!
https://t.co/l2UIrqgTFf

[Andy Bryant @AndyJBryant]

This actually gives me hope for EU

[conspiracybot @conspiracyb0t]

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz just called the EU a "complete failure" in front of global elites by stating, "Germany & Europe have wasted incredible potential. We have become the world champion of over-regulation & zero growth."