Instead of competing with OpenAI's mass-market ChatGPT, Anthropic focuses on the enterprise market. By prioritizing safety, reliability, and governance, it targets regulated industries like finance, legal, and healthcare, creating a defensible B2B niche as the "enterprise safety and reliability leader."

Instead of fearing competitors who copy their product, Synthesia's founder sees them as a net positive. The increased competition generates more market iterations and signals, helping them discover the most valuable use cases for the new technology faster than they could alone, while also sharpening their focus.

Synthesia initially targeted Hollywood with AI dubbing—a "vitamin" for experts. They found a much larger, "house-on-fire" problem by building a platform for the billions of people who couldn't create video at all, democratizing the medium instead of just improving it for existing professionals.

Higgsfield initially saw high adoption for viral, consumer-facing AI features but pivoted. They realized foundation model players like OpenAI will dominate and subsidize these markets. The defensible startup strategy is to ignore consumer virality and solve specific, monetizable B2B workflow problems instead.

While today's focus is on text-based LLMs, the true, defensible AI battleground will be in complex modalities like video. Generating video requires multiple interacting models and unique architectures, creating far greater potential for differentiation and a wider competitive moat than text-based interfaces, which will become commoditized.

For companies with jaw-dropping technology, it's easy to chase 'wow moments' and PR instead of solving real problems. Synthesia instills a core value of 'utility over novelty,' obsessing over delivering value for enterprise customers rather than getting lost in the novelty of their own tech.

By releasing Sora as an API for developers and businesses rather than a standalone consumer app, OpenAI reveals its core strategy. The goal is to empower enterprise use cases like ad generation, not to build a new video destination to compete with platforms like YouTube or TikTok.

While consumer AI video grabs headlines, Synthesia found a massive market by focusing on enterprise knowledge. Their talking-head avatars replace slide decks and text documents for corporate training, where utility trumps novelty and the competition is text, not high-production video.

Unlike AI companies targeting the consumer market, Anthropic's success with enterprise-focused products like "Claude Code" could shield it from the intense political scrutiny that plagued social media platforms. By selling to businesses, it avoids the unpredictable dynamics of the consumer internet and direct engagement with hot-button social issues.