Microsoft is deeply entwined in OpenAI and has obvious reasons to dogfood, yet their people are using Anthropic solutions.

Valuation behemoth OpenAI has been forced by the market to use Anthropic standards a couple times, having no comparable solutions of their own.

… I can see it.

Anthropic's marketing somehow punches hard. Not sure why, but the stuff they do sticks. Not because the products are great, but because the way they communicate about it gives people the right feeling. They do have legitimately the best coding model now for most tasks, and for narrative prose, but the marketing stuck and people stan'd them even when they were trailing.

Anthropic develops tools for developers and power users which are the actual people doing the evangelizing and marketing for them.

> Anthropic's marketing somehow punches hard. Not sure why

The fish rots from the head and marketing depends on being relatable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMAg8_yf9zA

Take a scroll through the comments.

It's Web 2.0 all over again. No moat, winner-take-all (economies-of-scale/network-effect). Just have to out-spend everyone else, and then figure out whether it was worth it all after you win.

Having a cutting edge model that requires tens of billions of dollars to train + a massive concentration of talent and experience + brand + one of, if not the best, coding experiences in Claude Code

These are all moats.

The moat seems rather small right now. There are 7 different companies represented in the top 10 models on openrouter.

Have you tried qwen3-coder-next? Model moats are going bye bye

Ah yes the 6m months of product development that’s mostly vibe coded. However will anyone build something better?

It wouldn’t be surprising at all if in 2 months everyone has moved on to another harness. In fact I think it’s more likely than not

> tens of billions of dollars to train

Source??

It's Microsofts moat and castle. Anthropic is renting a room.

Couldn’t their excellent model and coding experience generate another excellent coding CLI tool?

> cutting edge model that requires tens of billions of dollars to train

seems like there are a lot of those out there these days, and the costs are falling

> a massive concentration of talent and experience

Apparently 3000 employees? There's plenty of talent to be found elsewhere. Plus employees can be hired away.

> brand

meh.

> one of, if not the best, coding experiences

Seems easy enough to replicate, given how quickly they built it.

Ain't that for the entire ai field.

They have a moat on hype.

At least from the software engineer pleb perspective, their moat is that their tools seem to work well more often than not. I wasn't comfortable with the idea of using GitHub CoPilot as our GenAI solution at work, and apparently that was a widespread feeling, because we switched to Claude Code, and it's been a relatively smooth transition from manual coding to GenAI agentic loops.

FOMO, pretty much