The two AI titans are in a race to grow revenues, but they have very different strategies for releasing products. And one approach appears to be winning out.
OpenAI and Anthropic are locked in a fierce battle to secure substantial new revenue streams to help realize their AI dreams of unlocking artificial general intelligence.
The rival startups are cut from different cloths — Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI researchers who left to realize their alternative vision for safe AI. But after the past few years of intense competition, the startups are both pursuing the same prize: deep, reliable streams of enterprise revenue.
OpenAI has boasted of releasing “a new feature or capability roughly every three days.” Indeed, the list of products that OpenAI has launched in the past year is dizzying. In addition to more than a dozen versions of its GPT models, Open AI has released:
🧑🏼💻 Codex – an AI coding tool
🌎 Atlas – an AI-powered web browser
🎥 Sora – a text-to-video generation app
🤖 Operator – a web-browsing agent
👀 ChatGPT Agent – another web-browsing agent
🗣️ Whisper – an automatic speech recognition system for transcription
🌅 DALL-E – a text-to-image generator
🔎 ChatGPT Search – an AI-powered search engine
📰 ChatGPT Pulse – an AI-powered news aggregator
🧪 Prism – an AI-powered workspace for scientists
🩻 ChatGPT Health – a dedicated experience in ChatGPT for health and wellness
Compare that to Anthropic, which has been busy making its Claude chatbot better at spreadsheets, financial analysis, and slide decks — not exactly sexy AI superpowers, but the bread and butter of real work in businesses large and small. The company only has a few products sitting alongside Claude:
⚙️ Claude Code – a popular agentic coding tool
🖥️ Claude Cowork – a desktop AI agent
Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s new head of applications, told staff last week that they needed to focus their efforts on products for coding and enterprise, and not get distracted by “side quests,” according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
To get a sense of the cadence of these two startups’ product releases, we analyzed every press release from their company website and categorized them. When you lay them out on a timeline, you can see how different the product release cycles are for the two companies.
OpenAI and Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Forty-two is the answer to life, the universe, and everything in Douglas Adams’ classic “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” It’s also the number of unsupervised Robotaxis Tesla has on the road in Texas, the only state where it’s operating autonomous service, according to records from a newly required government database in the state.
That’s much lower than CEO Elon Musk had hoped, as the company struggles to ready its camera-only autonomous vehicles for commercial scale. In 2025, Musk said that the service would be available to “half the population of the US by the end of the year.”
Even smaller competition has more: Avride has 317 and Nuro has 47. Meanwhile, Tesla’s chief rival, Alphabet subsidiary Waymo, has 577 in operation in the state. Nationwide, Waymo’s fleet currently numbers more than 3,000.
Unfortunately for Tesla, figuring out how to actually scale its robotaxi fleet remains the ultimate question.
Anthropic’s monster $965 billion valuation puts it firmly ahead of OpenAI’s $850 billion valuation as the rivals head toward expected IPOs later this year.
Microsoft wants to fight its way back into the AI coding field by releasing a new model next week at its annual Microsoft Build developer conference, The Information reports.
The company is expected to announce a new family of models as Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman seeks to shore up the company’s own AI offerings and gradually wean it off OpenAI’s technology over the remainder of their $13 billion partnership.
Microsoft was initially well positioned to meet software developers with AI-enhanced tools. It owns GitHub, the most popular platform for hosting and sharing code, and GitHub’s Copilot AI-powered coding tool was released months before OpenAI’s ChatGPT debuted in 2022.
But it fumbled one of the biggest first-mover advantages in history as Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor rolled out coding tools that developers loved.
Microsoft was initially well positioned to meet software developers with AI-enhanced tools. It owns GitHub, the most popular platform for hosting and sharing code, and GitHub’s Copilot AI-powered coding tool was released months before OpenAI’s ChatGPT debuted in 2022.
But it fumbled one of the biggest first-mover advantages in history as Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and Cursor rolled out coding tools that developers loved.
The new vehicles are less expensive — which is important for the service to really scale.
If you listen to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, you might think rapid expansion of the company’s Robotaxi service is right around the corner. If you listen to the people tasked with reviewing the footage and training its AI, that future is a long way off.
An in-depth report from Reuters that interviewed nine former “data labelers” and a former Tesla self-driving engineer paints a picture of highly massaged safety stats, vehicles failing to execute basic driving functions, and a behind-the-scenes reality where the supposedly “autonomous” tech relies heavily on the exact kind of localized, labor-intensive mapping and training Musk has publicly mocked. The skepticism runs so deep that one former insider told reporters they wouldn’t ride in a Robotaxi “if you f—ing paid me.”
Currently, the service is operating about 30 unsupervised vehicles across three Texas cities — a much more circumscribed execution than Musk had initially planned. The problem, for Tesla, is that the success of its Robotaxi business is now integral to the company’s value proposition.
An in-depth report from Reuters that interviewed nine former “data labelers” and a former Tesla self-driving engineer paints a picture of highly massaged safety stats, vehicles failing to execute basic driving functions, and a behind-the-scenes reality where the supposedly “autonomous” tech relies heavily on the exact kind of localized, labor-intensive mapping and training Musk has publicly mocked. The skepticism runs so deep that one former insider told reporters they wouldn’t ride in a Robotaxi “if you f—ing paid me.”
Currently, the service is operating about 30 unsupervised vehicles across three Texas cities — a much more circumscribed execution than Musk had initially planned. The problem, for Tesla, is that the success of its Robotaxi business is now integral to the company’s value proposition.
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