> Literally every single person I know who’s building anything in AI (dozens of early stage founders) prefers Claude over GPT

I don't believe this at all. I am not here to argue that Claude is a worse model, only that Anthropic is a worse company.

> The AI emperor will not be the one who has the most consumers logging into product.com

Your point only goes to show how much Anthropic hates its end users.

> OpenAI’s continuous shedding of, as far as I can tell, every credible researcher

OpenAI has zero trouble hiring great talent. As I see it, they lost a lot of dead weight that had no interest in bringing AI to the masses, but had an agenda of their own instead.