There are a few problems with read=any (or really read=one as any is only supported by writes). One issue is it will still send the request out to all the servers in the quorum so even if you don't have to wait on a quorum you still put the read load on them.

The second and more important issue is that if you want consistent data the only way to use read=one is if you use write=all which means you would have no resilience to a server outage. So in a normal cassandra cluster where you have write=quorum a read=one can give you back no data. In my experience this happened frequently enough with long GC pauses on one of the nodes that it wasn't useful to use in production.