The optimistic view is that Anthropic is one of about four labs in the world capable of generating truly state-of-the-art models. Also, Claude Code is arguably the best tool in its category at the moment. They have the developer market locked in.
The problem as I see it is that neither of those things are significant moats. Both OpenAI and Google have far better branding and a much larger user base, and Google also has far lower costs due to TPUs. Claude Code is neat but in the long run will definitely be replicated.
The missing piece here is Anthropic is not playing the same game. Consumer branding and larger user base are concerns for OpenAI vs Google. Personal chatbot/companion/ search isn’t their focus.
Anthropic is going for the enterprise and for developers. They have scooped up more of the enterprise API market than either Google or OpenAI, and almost half the developer market. Those big, long contracts and integration into developer workflows can end up as pretty strong moats.
> Cursor had won the developer market from the previous winner copilot
It’s a fair point, but the counter-point is that back then these tools were ide plugins you could code up in a weekend. Ie closer to a consumer app.
Now Claude Code is a somewhat mature enterprise platform with plenty of integrations that you’d need to chase too. And long-term enterprise sales contracts you’d need to sell into. Ie much more like an enterprise SAAS play.
I don’t want to push this argument too far as I think their actual competitors (eg Google) could crank out the work required in 6-12 months if they decided to move in that direction, but it does protect them from some of the frothy VC-funded upstarts that simply can’t structurally compete in multi-year enterprise SAAS.
Fun fact! You can use the word "just" in front of anything to make is sound trivial. Isn't planet Earth just one of eight planets in the Solar System? What's the big deal? Isn't Google just a website? Take out the word "just" and think on it a little. In this case, maybe there's something to that?
Most of the secret sauce of Claude Code is visible to the world anyway, in the form of the minified JavaScript bundle they send. If you’re ever wondering about its inner workings you can simply ask it to deminify itself
Developers will jump ship to a better tool at a blink of an eye. I wouldn't call it locked in at all. In fact, people do use Claude Code and Codex simultaneously in some cases.
Individual and startup devs yes. Enterprise devs, less so.
The latter are locked in to whatever vendor(s) their corporate entity has subscribed to. In a perverse twist, this gives the approved[tm] vendors an incentive to add backend integrations to multiple different providers so that their actual end-users can - at least in theory - choose which models to use for their work.
most of the secret sauce of Claude Code is visible to the world anyway, in the form of the minified JavaScript bundle they send. If you’re ever wondering about its inner workings you can simply ask it to deminify itself
The problem as I see it is that neither of those things are significant moats. Both OpenAI and Google have far better branding and a much larger user base, and Google also has far lower costs due to TPUs. Claude Code is neat but in the long run will definitely be replicated.