alt Hacker NewsThis is an absolute joke.
Anthropic capitalized upon a brief window of being more code-focused, which turned into enterprize contracts.
Then on renewal rug-pulled those same enterprises - going from your seat includes all the usage a user would reasonably need, to being you pay for the seat + all tokens at API pricing. (Which they raised by how many times in a year? I don't know the actual number.)
Revenue spikes like crazy through basically hostage taking made possible by Sonnet 3.5 era sentiment + enterprise purchasing lag.
Parlay the revenue spike into the valuation.
Crazy. Those same enterprises will get sticker shock and leave. Absurd short-term thinking.
OpenAI is the better company (transparency, open sourcing things, how they handle things in general e.g. OpenClaw, how they compete, etc.) and they have the vastly better brand, the better consumer presence, and (for me and many others) they have the better coding app + models.
Anthropic doing deeply customer hostile stuff - again and again - to produce a short term revenue spike does NOT make for a long-term sustainable business.
For such a young business to have such a long history of bait-and-switch is absolutely crazy. (Raising prices repeatedly, lowering rate-limits repeatedly, changing the terms, banning calls which contain "OpenClaw", turning on their IDE partners, turning on their enterprise partners.)
AFAICT anyone who's ever shown faith in Anthropic has been immediately exploited by them to some degree. They will quickly get the reputation of being "the Oracle of AI companies".
I wouldn't even value them at half of OpenAI.
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I somewhat disagree, there was a major, major shift in developer sentiment towards agentic development starting with Opus 4.5 in October. Many teams started finding a lot more real value in Anthropic than they used to very recently. Things like OpenClaw are not a part of serious enterprises yet due to the security risk.
I’m not sure how anyone believes that per-seat pricing is halfway viable for AI, and I’m fairly sure the organizations I’m familiar with only REALLY started committing to spend after the shift to API pricing, due to the value they thought they were getting anyways.
OpenAI insider found!
My dude, this level of vitriol and hyperbole feels excessive. It's okay if you don't like Anthropic and you disagree with their business practices, but this is over-the-top even for the internet.
> Crazy. Those same enterprises will get sticker shock and leave.
They are already. Both for sticker shock, and also because of developer sentiment beginning to shift towards Codex. …and then in a month or two the winds will shift again, I'm sure.
It's interesting to see how Claude Code got commoditized so quickly.
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> and they have the vastly better brand
Strong disagree there. Anthropic has pretty successfully branded themselves as the more ethical & 'human' of the two companies. (whether that's the actual reality is irrelevant)