Welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…Anthropic is winning over business customers, but how are its own engineers using its Claude AI models…OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declares a “code red”…Apple reboots its AI efforts—again…Former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever says “it’s back to the age of research” as LLMs won’t deliver AGI…Is AI adoption slowing?
OpenAI certainly has the most recognizable brand in AI. As company founder and CEO Sam Altman said in a recent memo to staff, “ChatGPT is AI to most people.” But while OpenAI is increasingly focused on the consumer market—and, according to news reports declaring “a code red” in response to new, rival AI models from Google (see the “Eye on AI News” section below)—it may already be lagging in the competition for enterprise AI. In this battle for corporate tech budgets, one company has quietly emerged as the vendor big business customers seem to prefer: Anthropic.
Anthropic has, according to some research, moved past OpenAI in enterprise marketshare. A Menlo Ventures survey from the summer showed Anthropic with a 32% market share by model usage compared to OpenAI’s 25% and Google’s 20%. (OpenAI disputes these numbers, noting that Menlo Ventures is an Anthropic investor and that the survey had a small sample size. It says that it has 1 million paying business customers compared to Anthropic’s 330,000.) But estimates in a HSBC research report on OpenAI that was published last week also give Anthropic a 40% marketshare by total AI spending compared to OpenAI’s 29% and Google’s 22%.
How did Anthropic take the poll position in the race for enterprise AI adoption? That’s the question I set out to answer in the latest cover story of Fortune magazine. For the piece, I had exclusive access to Anthropic cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei and his sister Daniela Amodei, who serves as the company’s president and oversees much of its day-to-day operations, as well as to numerous other Anthropic execs. I also spoke to Anthropic’s customers to find out why they’ve come to prefer its Claude models. Claude’s prowess at coding, an area Anthropic devoted attention to early on, is clearly one reason. (More on that below.) But it turns out that part of the answer has to do with Anthropic’s focus on AI safety, which has given corporate tech buyers some assurance that its models are a less risky than competitors’. It’s a logic that undercuts the argument of some Anthropic critics, including powerful figures such as White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks, who see the company’s advocacy of AI safety testing requirements as a mistaken policy that will slow AI adoption.
Now the question facing Anthropic is whether it can hold on to its lead, raise enough funds to cover its still massive burn rate, and manage its hypergrowth without coming apart at the seams. Do you think Anthropic can go the distance? Give the story a read here and let me know what you think.
