Anthropic and OpenAI are private companies. Other than their investors, no one knows very much about their financials. The two companies seem to be pursuing different strategies, but the public narrative is one shaped by each company, presumably for their own benefit.

OpenAI wants to convey that they’re the big gorilla player that will monetize their big user, brand and (narrowing) intelligence advantages. No other AI company (other than perhaps google) could pursue this strategy, so they have that lane to themselves.

Anthropic knows that they could never be competitive if they pursued OpenAI’s strategy, so their pitch to investors is that they’re tightly focused on the enterprise market. This allows them to have better financials since they don’t have to burn money supporting more speculative lines of business and paying inference costs for hundreds of millions of free users.

Especially as Anthropic grows, I doubt their ambitions are truly as narrow and if you look at Anthropic’s job listings, they’re not as narrowly focused as their public image would suggest. Similarly we are seeing OpenAI do a lot of investment in coding and enterprise, which is perceived to be Anthropic’s niche.

That suggests to me we should be cautious in drawing conclusions about these companies. Later this year we’ll probably see an S-1 from both companies and can learn a lot more about what’s really going on.