Probably the bigger headline here is that they’ve blown past OpenAI in revenue and valuation, with OpenAI looking increasingly shaky and vulnerable.
Things change fast in this space. Anthropic had a big boost from having the premier coding model for a while, but GPT-5.5 has closed that gap at a time when a lot of Anthropic customers are looking for cheaper alternatives.
Anthropic is coming off of a recent change to their enterprise billing that substantially changed the pricing for many users. They were smart to do the fundraising before the effects of that change could fully propagate.
There's no better way to create awareness of a brand than to get it featured in the most popular reality TV show globally at the moment: "Thing Trump Did: Season 2."
[1] Proof: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=... (see the massive spike in January of this year)
My wife knows about Claude because that's what I use and we pay for. She uses it also as a result. And inevitably she will talk about Claude to her friends.
Absolutely not, you live in a bubble. Everybody knows about ChatGPT.
Few non-programmers have heard of anthropic or claude, nor do they care. But they all know what ChatGPT is.
https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/a253471f-8260-40c6-a2cc-aa93fe9f1...
Maybe Im projecting my distaste for being psychologically manipulated, but I dont think users would continue using a genAI that embeds ads directly into the response when they can just switch to gemini where they only see banners.
Many people I know have started simply calling it "Chat".
"I had Chat help me write this" (I didn't, I promise)
They own "chat.com", I think OpenAI should pull the trigger and move to the shorter domain and finish the rebrand.
e.g. "I put it in chatgtp and..." when they actual asked Gemini.
Still everyone knows what I'm talking about.
The people in real life who say ChatGBT or similar are either so out of the loop the technology doesn't even matter to them, or simply are just stupid.
There is no way a person who can't get "GPT" right is even worth listening to.
They ran a super bowl ad. It's all over the construction industry. Claude is still not quite the Kleenex that ChatGPT is, but there is a pretty good chance lay people have heard of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude by now.
To disagree with the person below/above me that ChatGPT is the word used generically, when someone uses Gemini or Claude or Copilot, they TELL you which one they used, because they are essentially saying "i didnt use ChatGPT by choice."
Gemini is the one most likely to be used without people knowing which one they used.
ChatGPT is too awkward to do that with.
For enterprise, Anthropic is crushing it. In the manufacturing sector I anecdotally hear a 2:1 ratio of Claude to ChatGPT for teams who are settling on a platform.
Unfortunately even though we have a degree or two of seperation from most federal contracts the punitive DoD blacklisting had enough of a chilling effect on our legal team to make them drag their feet on approving any contract involving Anthropic.
So I pitched OpenAI Business with Codex so we could drop our Github Copilot Business subscription before the billing change takes effect June 1st which was approved without pushback.
I felt some responsibility for finding an immediate solution to dump Copilot since I was the one who recommended adopting Copilot in the first place, ugh... Our prices would have quadrupled based on the single month Microsoft in their beneficence allowed previewing with their tool to simulate what the post-rug pull pricing would have looked like.
Codex becoming more or less a 1:1 replacement for CC made that a no brainer given our options and the exploitative value proposition of Copilot under the new pricing model (which Microsoft evidently hoped companies like us would just accept despite being a third tier option in the dev space these days).
Their marketing has been working the high end of the “regular people” market for a good while.
GPT-5.5 is a bit more expensive than Opus ? Current list prices
| Model | Input | Output |
| GPT-5.5 | $5/MTok | $30/MTok |
| Opus 4.8/7 | $5/MTok | $25/MTok |
Per-token pricing is totally sensible from the provider-perspective on mapping COGS to revenue, but for a consumer, different models will produce more or less tokens, meaning the cost calculation is multi-dimensional.
Input/Cache/Output ratios are use case and configuration dependent . Any benefits in one model can usually be roughly to another with configuration tuning, and discussions devolve into subjective experience.
Pricing sheet is the objective way to compare cost.
Everything else is subjective to your setup, use case, configuration tuning and so forth.
More importantly bean-counters and decision makers at even 150+ seat orgs are looking at pricing sheets and enterprise contracts not how it performs for some team in a specific harness today to make million dollar annual contracts. It is not common for procurement teams to do commission the level of detailed analysis or large scale pilots that will actually hold for the duration of contract.
That doesn't mean that GPT-5.5 is selling less than Claude at all, just that cost is not the primary driver if list price is not cheaper, there is reason these are published in the same format by every vendor, because the common metric is how finance likes to compare with.
Considering that their models are de facto extremely close in performance you would think that these arguments would've held, but they clearly don't.
I don't like Altman and I am still upset about his memory deal last year but he prepared for the current shortages months before anybody else. Meanwhile, Anthropic seems to lack any plans besides third party contracting. IMHO they got very lucky with xAI and Google having spare capacity and willing to rent it. But what about next year?
It is not clear that running one's own datacenter is a competitive advantage. Why do you think OpenAI can handle that?
Anthropics relativ longterm contract with xAI def shows that they can fill the capacity vs Musk not. OpenAI and Anthropic are both using a lot of capacity so its fair to say that this is an advantage.
If they stay very close competitive (which they are), your own datacenter does reduce token price.
* NVidia GPU, Google TPU, Apple SoC, etc.
A short half-life means you are going to quickly dispose of what you have now, anyway. In fact most current datacenters can't even handle Vera Rubin, so I don't think there's short term risk here.
Nvidia has probably monopolized several upstream supplies to manufacture critical chip components for next 2 years, the HBMs and Optics component from LITE, as well as TSM capacity. Let alone those power components they funded themselves.
Let's say you have a genius design, but you will have it close to impossible to compete with Nvidia in getting it to volumes.
Jensen is a player, he isn't fooling around with all these Asian trips just to wine and dine
Everyone has critical risk on multiple parts of the supply chain. GPUs and Memory are just things OAI mitigated for.
Power - Bigger bottleneck than GPU or RAM perhaps, New Grid connected capacity is typically 10+ year timescale with lot of regulatory friction. Captive capacity is also quite constrained - now Gas turbines have 7+ year wait time.
There are plenty of hard constraints that OAI cannot easily solve either.
I mean, this is a bit like complaining that McDonalds doesn't have their own herds of cows. OpenAI actually isn't in the business of buying GPUs or running data centres, and it's pretty weird to think that's an advantage (though it comes up constantly on here, as Anthropic keeps eating OpenAI's lunch).
There are many suppliers that are desperate to fight for Anthropics business, and it has shown an agility to embrace whatever advances in the industry come along. Anthropic is now running across a million or so Google TPUv8s, for instance. If tomorrow someone else comes out with a better GPU/TPU, they can embrace it in a heartbeat.
All while OpenAI sits on their rapidly depreciating GPUs.
Or...actually they won't, because OpenAI doesn't take business advice from HN. The vast majority of OpenAI's compute is from Microsoft, Oracle and so on. They're smart enough to not become a big hardware purchaser when that isn't their business. The core claim of your comment simply isn't true at all, nor is that the direction OpenAI is moving.
He told me they are massively pulling back on the AI stuff.
Right now the lashback is about cost, because that's the most easily measured pain point.
Soon, we'll start seeing a deeper understanding of the quality issues. At that point, it's likely this whole experiment gets firmly put in a bin of the toolbox where it belongs.
Most people don't yet have mature enough setups to fully exploit that level of use.
Why? Have we figured out the limits of what agents can do?
> OpenAI is much less exposed to tokenmaxxing
I don't think this is true, from my own experience & chatting with my acquaintances.
If a task can be completed with 100k tokens but employees are considered better performers if they complete it with 500k tokens instead… that’s unsustainable and cannot possibly benefit Anthropic in the long term.
At some point, Amazon and Uber and so on and so forth are going to realize that actually, employees using 100k tokens or even 50k tokens is better than 500k and Anthropic’s revenue will fall off a cliff.
And I could be wrong about tokenmaxxing being a Claude specific problem but as far as I can tell, all of the major companies encouraging employees to maximize their token usage are Claude Code users. And the music has to stop on that at some point, whether because the companies run out of money or because they learn better ways of measuring productivity in the AI age. And if tokenmaxxing is what is driving Anthropic’s lead in revenue, it could be catastrophic to lose that, because Anthropic are spending billions of dollars per month on the infrastructure to support it.
If tokenmaxxing is evenly distributed between Anthropic and OpenAI then they’ll both hurt but equal hurt shouldn’t disadvantage either much.
I see most of the surge here comes FOMO AI spending which will have to be dialed down later half of the year, otherwise those companies will have to layoff to fund their AI bill, which is harmful to their business.
Anthropic grabs its bag at the peak, but feast is over.
They don't seem too far off to me.
Especially if you assume that 6 months ago they weren't very close to this version of profitable
I don't think SOTA-wise Google has a lot of catch up to do.
Well functioning market is supposed to have many, as in a lot, companies with similar products. To create competition.
How the hell do you crush a ~1T company on the one thing they have all their focus on?
Me, not a SWE, I have never even tried Claude
(and I am not sure I prefer ChatGPT over Google)
Both Anthropic and OpenAI only has access to whatever they can buy or steal.
And it's becoming increasingly hard to get fresh uncontaminated data for training. No amount of money can buy that.
Claude Code and Codex are a big advantage, vs Gemini CLI which might be killedbygoogle soon? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196867
> Both Anthropic and OpenAI only has access to whatever they can buy or steal. A trillion can buy you quite a lot! Like offer some company a ton of money for data, and if they say no simply buy said company. Bonus points if it's someone like Atlassian who's stock price is getting hammered largely because of you.
People have been going to Google for a quarter of a century, and I imagine they will continue to do so.
As far as I am concerned, I moved to DDG in 2013 and never looked back, but I find Google AI intriguing.
I think Google has caught up enough to certainly be a player in the consumer ad driven market.
I also don't think only one foundation model adds up. Now that the trail is blazed a dozen companies can likely make a good enough model. The question is if there's a moat to make it winner take all