Anthropic dominated the crucial developer market by strategically focusing on coding, believing it to be the best predictor of a model's overall reasoning abilities. This targeted approach allowed their Claude models to consistently excel in this vertical, making agentic coding the breakout AI use case of the year and building an incredibly loyal developer following.

While OpenAI pursues a broad strategy across consumer, science, and enterprise, Anthropic is hyper-focused on the $2 trillion software development market. This narrow focus on high-value enterprise use cases is allowing it to accelerate revenue significantly faster than its more diversified rival.

The development of Claude Cowork demonstrates a massive acceleration in product velocity. The entire application was written by its underlying AI agent, Claude Code, in just a week and a half. This showcases how AI-driven coding is collapsing development cycles for new software products.

Contrary to the popular narrative of OpenAI's dominance, analysis suggests Anthropic's quarterly ARR additions have already overtaken OpenAI's. The rapid, viral adoption of Claude Code is seen as the primary driver, positioning Anthropic to dramatically outgrow its main rival, with growth constrained only by compute availability.

Claude Code can take a high-level goal, ask clarifying questions, and then independently work for over an hour to generate code and deploy a working website. This signals a shift from AI as a simple tool to AI as an autonomous agent capable of complex, multi-step projects.

The success of tools like Anthropic's Claude Code demonstrates that well-designed harnesses are what transform a powerful AI model from a simple chatbot into a genuinely useful digital assistant. The scaffolding provides the necessary context and structure for the model to perform complex tasks effectively.

While ChatGPT has wider general usage, Claude is the preferred primary tool for the most engaged AI users. These users leverage AI for more hours, engage in more complex 'agentic' tasks, and report higher value gains, indicating Claude's strength with the advanced builder/practitioner segment.

AI tools like Claude Cowork can now handle complex tasks like app development, including UX/UI design and coding, from natural language prompts. This dramatically lowers the barrier to creating custom software, as demonstrated by one host building a fully functional meditation app in minutes.

Cowork, a polished product from a major AI lab, was developed in just over a week using Claude Code itself. This is a major proof point that AI-assisted "vibe coding" is no longer just for prototypes but is a viable method for achieving extreme product velocity on production-grade software.