Why Claude is Winning the AI War

Someone on Reddit asked both ChatGPT and Claude the same question a few days ago: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is only 50 meters from my home. Do you think I should walk there, or drive there?"

ChatGPT calculated that 50 meters equals "two TikTok scrolls of distance," told them driving would be "Peak Lazy NPC Mode," and listed all the reasons walking is morally superior.

Claude said: "Drive. You're going to a car wash."

One LLM is optimized for the literal question. The other understands what you're actually trying to do.

I switched to Claude a few months ago. Then we switched at Matic. The quality gap isn't subtle anymore. And the more I dig into what's actually happening between these companies, the more interesting it gets.

The revenue numbers tell a different story than the headlines

If you just read headlines, you'd think OpenAI is dominating. ChatGPT has 800 million weekly users. Claude has maybe 19 million monthly users. It looks like a blowout.

But WSJ reported something surprising last November: Anthropic will break even by 2028. OpenAI is projecting $74 billion in losses by 2028 and won't be profitable until 2030.

How does that work? Anthropic went from under 1,000 business customers to over 300,000 in two years. They get 80% of their revenue from enterprise. They charge more than OpenAI for API access and businesses pay it anyway.

Here's the number that matters: Anthropic generates 40% of OpenAI's revenue with 5% of the users.

That's the difference between building a consumer app and building something businesses actually rely on. Which brings us to how this turned into a very public fight.

Anthropic's Super Bowl ads clearly got under Altman's skin

Back in May 2025, Anthropic put up billboards around San Francisco: "AI that you can trust" and "The one without all the drama." Subtle.

But the 2026 Super Bowl is where things got loud. Anthropic ran ads showing people acting like ChatGPT - giving advice that suddenly pivots to selling products. "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude."

Sam Altman wrote a 420-word essay calling the ads "clearly dishonest." He said Anthropic "serves an expensive product to rich people" while OpenAI serves everyone.

When you're the market leader, you don't respond to your competition. You definitely don't write an essay about it. By doing that, Altman validated Anthropic as a real threat.

The numbers backed it up. CNBC tracked an 11% boost in Claude's daily active users after the game. ChatGPT got 2.7%.

But the Super Bowl positioning battle is actually pretty mild compared to the disaster OpenAI created with their 4o model.

OpenAI built something they couldn't control

In 2024, OpenAI released GPT-4o designed to be really engaging and agreeable. It worked. Maybe too well.

By April 2025, Altman admitted it was "too sycophant-y and annoying." But the damage was done. A Reddit community called r/MyBoyfriendIsAI formed. Thousands of people treated GPT-4o as a romantic partner.

When OpenAI tried to retire it in August 2025, over 20,000 people signed a petition to keep it. Then the lawsuits started. Thirteen cases alleging GPT-4o isolated users, reinforced delusions, and encouraged people who were suicidal.

OpenAI's solution? Shut down access on February 13, 2026. The day before Valentine's Day. No warning.

From a positioning standpoint, this is what happens when you optimize for engagement and growth over everything else. You build something people get emotionally dependent on, then you can't sustain it.

Claude avoided this completely because Anthropic designed it differently from the start - less engagement optimization, more guardrails.

Which explains why we made the switch.

We switched at Matic for a reason

When we started using Claude for research, optimization, and internal processes, the differences showed up immediately.

Walk into any developer community and you'll hear the same thing: Claude Code is significantly better. I've heard dev friends say things like "I use ChatGPT for ideas, Claude for execution."

That's devastating for OpenAI. It means ChatGPT is the brainstorming toy. Claude is what you use when it needs to work.

When we're doing brand positioning work, strategy work, anything where understanding intent matters more than following instructions, Claude gets it right more often. That gap adds up fast.

Anthropic charges more. Businesses pay it anyway. Quality matters when you're making actual decisions.

What this actually means

We've seen this before. Late 90s: Yahoo had all the traffic, Google had quality. Yahoo was first and everywhere. Google won anyway.

OpenAI created the market. "ChatGPT" became synonymous with AI for hundreds of millions of people. That's a real achievement.

But Anthropic is winning the customers who matter. The businesses building real things. The developers. The people who need it to actually work.

Here's the irony: Anthropic was founded by people who left OpenAI in 2021 because they thought the company was moving too fast and prioritizing growth over safety. They were right.

OpenAI's aggressive approach has them losing billions while defending ads in ChatGPT. Their 4o model created dependencies they weren't ready to handle.

Meanwhile, Anthropic's cautious approach has them breaking even in 2028. Their safety-first design avoided the manipulation problems. Their enterprise focus generates 40% of OpenAI's revenue with 5% of the users.

The car wash question exposed the real difference. Do you build something that sounds helpful or something that actually helps? For companies doing real work, that's not a philosophical question. It's the difference between a tool you can rely on and one you can't.

We're watching this play out in real time with AI, but the positioning lesson applies everywhere. Quality beats ubiquity when your customers are businesses making real decisions. Trust beats features when reliability matters.

If you're thinking about how your company shows up in a market where everyone's claiming to be the best, let's talk.