Ant's recent rise has little to none to do with retail subscribers, it is Claude Code with Opus 4.5+, followed by their Mythos stunt

I would say the flood of $20 Claude Subscribers due to news cycle backfired on them, now everyone is getting worse outputs and exposed their shortage on compute, which they can't fix anytime soon.

Pretty much everyone I know has both cc and codex now, just because how unreliable cc has become.

This is a good hypothesis. I suspect we are both correct.

The PR boost from Anthropic standing its ground drove signups. That, in turn, drove investors. But the users also drove utilization, which degraded quality across the board.

My hypothesis rests on Anthropic’s user mix having significantly shifted to consumers (versus enterprise) after the mix-up. Whenever we get public numbers it would be interesting to test that.

I think it was psychological to a degree. For many consumers OpenAI, or at least ChatGPT was AI. The controversy was enough for folks to be introduced to competitors in the AI space and suddenly OpenAI's success felt a lot less inevitable.

I agree with OP though that this won't actually be the cause of OpenAI's downfall, should it happen. But I still think it's an interesting inflection point.

This is true. OpenAI WAS the story of AI, now it is just 50% of it, at max. Losing the monopoly of imagination towards AGI is bad for them.

One thing I don't agree though, consumers aren't the important part of AI, they are a liability.

AI is too expensive, consumers can't pay for it. Instead they will compete with enterprise for the same tokens, with less money.

This is my suspicion. Consumers hadn’t previously heard of Anthropic and Claude. Now they had, particularly in cities.

> this won't actually be the cause of OpenAI's downfall, should it happen. But I still think it's an interesting inflection point

Also agree. Hence why I said “I don’t think” the fight is “the ultimate cause.”

Of course this is part of what has lead to such insane demand and outages they've experienced since then.

"Stunt", eh?

Sure. Neither OpenAI or Anthropic do. Amazon and Google have followed institutional investors bidding up Anthropic over OpenAI in private markets, all of which—I suspect—followed user-pattern shifts following the fiasco. (Well, fiascos. Altman is a host unto himself.)

lol hes barely done anything, but sometimes that is all that's necessary when a bozo opponent is hell-bent on screwing things up. He didn't get fired the first time for no reason.

An former chess instructor told me most games are won not by brilliant maneuver, but by not screwing up. Repeatedly making the boring play is a winning strategy far more often than any mastermind play.

Opposite of what you said. The "dig" was not retrenching to more use, but rather I evaluated what I saw them doing and have migrated our company to much better options.

Individually, yes. Anthropic surging in private markets the weekend after the supply-chain risk designation, and raising from not only Google but also Amazon in such short clip (following credibly reports of it turning down $800+ billion valuation cheques from financial investors), all while OpenAI gets pilloried in the press and struggles to hold its $800bn valuation in private markets, collectively—to me—paints a bigger picture.

I always wondered why Anthropic was not out there feverishly scrambling to procure compute like the other big players. While Altman was being laughed at as a "podcasting bro asking for trillions in investment" Dario was on Dwarkesh expounding on how tricky it is to predict the demand for capacity. Now Dario has to give equity to a competitor to get compute. (OpenAI does this too, of course, but I suspect the terms are much better.)

At this point, it's pretty clear that compute is the only moat in this business. Even as an outsider, the extreme demand curves and compute crunch were painfully obvious, so this seems like a serious strategic error on Dario's part.