I just looked at Netflix's latest financial report, and I have to say, this timing is really a bit delicate.

Netflix founder Hastings announced he would step down completely after June, no longer serving as chairman. On the same day, Netflix delivered its most impressive results since inception—$12.25 billion in revenue, a 16% year-over-year increase, with net profit soaring by 83%, and profit margin reaching 32%. The company has never made this much money before, yet the founder chose this moment to leave.

On the surface, there doesn't seem to be any disagreement, but the more they emphasize there’s no disagreement, the more curious I am about his true intentions. I looked into his actions over the past year and realized what this guy is really thinking.

Last May, Hastings joined the board of Anthropic. This decision seems a bit strange—someone who has dominated the content paid subscription field for nearly 30 years, why sit on the board of an AI safety company?

The key is, he himself actually has an AI background. He earned a master's in AI from Stanford in 1988, recognizing this field 40 years ago—long before most people. Back then, AI wasn’t very useful, so he switched to software, eventually founding Netflix. But anyone who has studied AI can’t ignore this field.

I noticed his attitude is changing. In an interview in 2024, he was quite optimistic, saying AI could help creative work. But by March this year, in an interview show, he was very straightforward—what’s the biggest risk Netflix faces? Not competitors, not member growth, but two words: AI.

His logic is very clear. If AI can make the free content on YouTube sufficiently engaging, would young people still pay to watch Netflix?

A more concrete threat has already arrived. ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 can generate 2K videos with camera movements, sound effects, and lip-sync within 60 seconds. In e-commerce advertising, one person can complete what used to take seven people three days in just 30 minutes, reducing costs by over 99%. This isn’t the future; it’s happening now.

So Hastings made an interesting choice—he holds Netflix stock and $5.8 billion in wealth, while sitting at the table of AI safety. This isn’t retirement; it’s hedging.

Netflix itself is also using AI to reduce production costs, recently spending up to $600 million to acquire a company that makes AI-driven film and TV production tools. But what the Netflix founder worries about might not be how to use AI to improve efficiency, but whether someone can use AI to lower production barriers from hundreds of millions of dollars to just a few dollars.

He has personally done a “use new technology to slash content costs enough to kill off the previous winners” move before—that’s how Netflix killed DVD rentals and heavily disrupted cable TV. Now, watching AI, he’s probably thinking about who’s next to be disrupted.

So this guy is both a major shareholder of Netflix and a director at Anthropic, holding shares in his own company, sitting at a table that could potentially overturn the industry of this company. Whether this is foresight or overthinking might only be answered when AI can really produce movies that viewers are willing to watch till the end.