I've tried a bunch of LLMs, and I agree that Claude is currently the best at coding, but the gap isn't huge. Gemini 3.8 Flash is surprisingly good and I'm looking forward to trying Gemini 4. The open weights models like Kimi, GLM, etc. are a little behind in quality I think but not massively.

With harnesses I see little difference between what Zed or Pi gives me and what Claude Code gives me. Enterprise features? The AI can help code those in a week.

AI itself is a great breaker of moats.

The question isn't whether they lead today. It's whether there's any kind of moat. Without a moat, frontier model development is an industry like chip fabrication or large volume manufacturing. Those industries are a red queen's race where if you stop innovating for even a short while you sink. Ask Intel what happened when they decided to coast for a few years.

Chip fabs and bulk manufacturers make a lot of money, sure, but they don't command such a multiple. Anthropic is priced like they're going to be to AI what Google was to web search or Apple is to (US at least) mobile and higher-end PCs.

I don't see it. I think they'll be a big player but that big?

Of course... maybe if they suddenly have that much cash they'll be able to carpet bomb the entire world with AI doom Rationalist ideology and buy their regulatory capture and outlaw their competition.