Anthropic Leaps Ahead In AI Race in a Week

“Anthropic once appeared as an also-ran in the chaotic race for AI supremacy. This week, the sophistication of the startup's products upended the stock market.

 

A simple set of industry-specific add-ons to its Claude product, including one that performed legal services, triggered a dayslong global stock selloff, from software to legal services, financial data and real estate.

 

Then, Anthropic unveiled Super Bowl ads that taunt rival OpenAI.

 

On Thursday, Anthropic unleashed its most advanced model yet, capable of synthesizing data and analysis, running teams of coding assistants and functions akin to product management. Shares of software companies including Salesforce, Intuit and others fell again Thursday, although less precipitously than earlier in the week.

 

The viral moment for Anthropic's models "is the most important thing that's happened in AI since ChatGPT's launch," said Dean Ball, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation who writes an artificial-intelligence newsletter. "It's infinitely interesting."

 

Industry prognosticators and AI evangelists have spent months foretelling the toll Anthropic and other sophisticated AI tools would take on software-as-a-service companies that were darlings of the previous internet era. Tools made by companies such as Workday, Monday.com and Adobe have become the digital backbone for many American corporations.

 

Anthropic's tools, which include agents that can act autonomously to carry out increasingly complex user requests for hours, have offered a preview of the threat sophisticated AI models pose to entire companies. The startup has fought its way to the forefront of the AI conversation with a novel strategy focused on safety, software engineering and business customers.

 

The result: a broader business reckoning that has left corporate leaders asking what it will mean when an AI system can easily replicate expertise developed over a lifetime of coding or, in the case of companies, years of corporate development.

 

Tech titans such as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and others have warned that the correction is an overreaction, because many platforms are far more complex and intricate than spinning up simple websites and apps. Many companies also give priority to investing in their businesses rather than building internal software tools, analysts have said.

 

Still, tech giants including Microsoft, Amazon.com, Meta Platforms, Oracle and Alphabet's Google are planning more than $600 billion in 2026 capital spending, an amount that approaches the 2026 spending budget of Japan and exceeds those of Germany and Mexico. Anthropic -- and all the ways the world might use its tools -- are crucial drivers of that spending.

 

Co-founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei, a former Google researcher who left OpenAI after a feud with Chief Executive Sam Altman, Anthropic's focus on safety is often credited as a primary reason it initially fell behind OpenAI.

 

The company delayed publicly releasing its AI models in 2022 out of a concern they would lead to an AI arms race. That November, OpenAI kicked off the AI boom when it unveiled ChatGPT, and Anthropic followed suit a few months later.

 

Early on, Anthropic focused on business customers and software engineering, reasoning that establishing itself in those areas would provide a foundation for stable growth.

 

For years, it looked as though its decision to delay the launch would keep Anthropic permanently behind OpenAI, which saw its monthly active users soar as millions of people began experimenting with its flagship model, which was presented in chatbot form. Anthropic's focus on safety has played a key role in its recent resurgence.

 

The company pioneered a technique called "reinforcement learning from AI feedback" to ensure that its models avoid harmful or unsafe answers. Human feedback on the quality and safety of AI answers helped build ChatGPT. Anthropic took steps to use AI systems to check AI answers, with humans providing guiding principles.

 

One advantage of its reinforcement learning method is that it would help avoid human bias, but it has also sped up Anthropic's ability to improve its models, company executives have said.

 

Software engineering was at the center of its appeal to business customers, and company executives saw it as an eventual bridge to additional capabilities. A model that can master coding can do relatively anything on a computer.

 

Early releases wowed software engineers, with some saying it enabled them to do projects in weeks that may have otherwise taken a year. Usage metastasized from there, spreading to noncoders and tech enthusiasts who raved about how it could take control of a computer, use a web browser and complete tasks far afield from coding.

 

"Anthropic has been going for the enterprise game, which they discovered is all about coding," said David Hsu, the chief executive of Retool, a startup that helps companies build and manage internal AI tools.

 

By some measures, Anthropic has pulled ahead in the business market. Data from expense-management startup Ramp shows that Anthropic in January dominated "API spending," which occurs when users access an AI model through a third-party service. Anthropic's models made up nearly 80% of the market in January, the Ramp data show.

 

Some broad surveys of companies in the last six months suggest OpenAI has more enterprise users.

 

Anthropic's success in enterprise has put it on a course to turn a profit earlier than OpenAI. The Claude-maker expects to break even for the first time in 2028, two years before OpenAI, which is facing ballooning costs due to its computing needs, The Wall Street Journal reported.

 

The Wall Street Journal's parent company, News Corp, has a content deal with OpenAI.” [1]

 

1. Anthropic Leaps Ahead In AI Race in a Week. Olson, Bradley.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 06 Feb 2026: B1.