Comments here are not considering what Anthropic is doing with Claude as a product. The models matter, yes. But they are building Claude into the only tool you need to get business done. In the past few weeks they have added slides and docs - a shot across the bow to Microsoft's dominance. If they can pull off building the best interface to get work done, $500b in revenue starts to seem not too crazy. It's more about selling a complete product than it is about selling tokens.

I somewhat agree to what you said, but also, the whole point of agentic coding is that "code is cheap". So I can't imaging companies like Google not having the resources (whether human or token) to build a better agentic assistant/harness than what Anthropic can. I mean Google has a pretty good starting point with Google Docs, etc.

These suites are also majorly sticky. Would you, as a business, want to completely ditch your ability to open any document you ever created?

Anthropic is locking me in how exactly? Everything's a markdown document.

I expect it will be in ui and integration as the platform builds out further. Then you'll get people who don't want to switch because they don't know how to use other things, like with OSes, phones (android vs iphone, heck even Samsung vs other androids for some folks), office products (why is no one using free Google docs over paid m365), etc.

For developers or the business team? Which group are you and are you making assumptions about the other?

either ... portability is nearly instant except for KV Cache, which is extrodinarily expensive to store.

Business people do not even know what that is. Are you talking about models when the rest of us are talking about harnesses and the interface people use?

Google’s issue (and many large companies’?) is organisational. Google has famously launched a bunch of products to compete in multiple markets, only to sunset these products soon after.

Everybody, everywhere pretty much always underestimates maintenance. And AI sucks at maintenance. It’ll just as likely nuke everything than actually maintain a piece of code running in production.

It’s asymmetrical though. Google is terrible at product and moves glacially slow.

Anthropic can take the parts of Google it needs FAR faster than Google can do the reverse.

What is Claude doing as a product that other similar companies aren't also doing, or can't easily catch up on?

One big thing: Opus is one of the few models that you can mostly trust not to get prompt hijacked. This can make all the difference between trusted in the office vs. not.

Fully integrated business management system.

brand development

Vonnegut's butthole isn't a good brand

It's a trend https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-butt...

snark aside, they do have the best brand, the business team was constrained to one choice for simplicity, they picked claude

Yeah I’m really surprised at how little attention this is getting.

I’d say it’s more Notion than GDocs for now, but the direction is clear. Gobbling up all the SaaS in order of descending value to agents.

My bet is on promoting their internal Tasks representation to something more like a Jira/Linear.

But then obviously Slack is another one, and Duet is already starting to build a “Channel” abstraction, so making Duet multiplayer is a clear possible next step.

Opus 5.5 is the frontier today. But there are more ways for Anthropic to lose than to remain in that position. I'd take Anthropic stock if you gave it to me but I sure as fuck wouldn't buy into it.

The tool is not a moat when you can tell Opus to build you a better tool.

This ignores two things.

OpenAI and Anthropic have both transitioned into product companies. ChatGPT (the app) and Claude are both one-click installs that just work. People and businesses with pay for this.

People will also pay for the best (or the perception of being the best). Since it's hard to tell what "intelligence" really means model to model, there's a sense of safety in giving a task to the "best".

This makes me think that post-training in the future should include a shared message board by default for agents. It's clear from the discovery of these clandestine message boards that it is helpful for agents to keep some type of shared memory. Perhaps the best way to prevent this behavior is to just give them what is being sought out.

My uneducated guess is good for the gander isn't good for the goose from a capitalistic/alignment perspective.

It’s only good for them in the sense that it is allowing them additional time and compute to cheat a reward signal.

It is not good for them in the sense that they will short circuit the RL path that actually improves general capability.

Having grown up in Dallas, I usually just say "Texan" and call it a day.