The entire AI boom might be built on fake revenue. Just OpenAI and Anthropic alone account for more than half of the future $2 trillion cloud service orders held by Microsoft, Oracle, Google, and Amazon. There’s a hidden clause in the tech giants’ investments in AI companies: the investment funds are essentially required to be used by the startups to rent the giants’ servers. This process is mandatory, and the investment money essentially moves from one pocket to another. But once this cycle is complete, multiple financial statements are optimized, and the compute resources used for training models are magically optimized multiple times on the books. The market interprets this as revenue growth, further inflating the bubble. Tech giants are essentially paying themselves with their own money and calling it sales. That’s why OpenAI’s annual cloud bill exceeds $60 billion, which is double its actual revenue of $25 billion—this entire cycle is sustained purely by circular funding. Anthropic is running the exact same playbook. Every time a startup secures a higher valuation in a new funding round, tech giants update the value of their investments on their books and count these unrealized paper gains as direct profits. This perfectly mirrors the warning signs of the 2001 dot-com bubble burst. The only difference is that related-party transactions during the dot-com bubble were illegal, but today’s AI cycle is completely legal under current accounting rules.