Anthropic Just Dethroned OpenAI. Here's What Happens Next.
Chapters6
The video notes that Anthropic has reportedly overtaken OpenAI in business adoption per a new research article, and it highlights immediate industry reactions such as Codex offering free usage and Claude Code boosting limits in response, illustrating a heated, back-and-forth AI coding tools landscape. The speaker uses this moment to frame the broader dynamics of competition and incentives shaping the market.
Anthropic’s rising adoption moment sparks a coding-AI tools war, pushing you to test multiple models now and build resilient workflows.
Summary
Nate Herk breaks down a hot industry moment: Anthropic reportedly edges OpenAI in business adoption in April, prompting a flurry of competitive moves from Codex and Claude Code. He cites a research article showing Anthropic leading OpenAI in adoption, then highlights Sam Altman’s tweet about Codex offering two months of free Codex usage to lure companies away from Cloud Code. Claude Code responds with a 50% bump in weekly limits through July 13, underscoring the competitive feedback loop. Herk argues the real battleground isn’t just model quality but adoption and data—the fuel that tightens AI moats through usage, feedback, and proprietary data. He notes past profitability struggles for OpenAI Pro and emphasizes that the cost to a business using these tools is dominated by output and habit formation, not raw monthly fees. The discussion shifts to strategic takeaways: don’t lock yourself to a single tool, develop multi-tool workflows, and start planning for a future where you can move projects across tools with minimal friction. He also frames the current phase as a “free sample” period where adoption drives data acquisition and cost absorption for the providers. In closing, Herk invites viewers to share opinions and to rethink pricing dynamics as a long-term habit-forming race rather than a one-off price fight. He jokes about future monetization ideas to keep the mood light while stressing practical habit-building for developers and teams.
Key Takeaways
- Anthropic surpassed OpenAI in business adoption in April, signaling a shift in enterprise preference for coding assistants.
- Codex offers two months of free usage to entice migration from Cloud Code, highlighting aggressive customer acquisition tactics.
- Claude Code increased weekly usage limits by 50% through July 13, illustrating rival incentives to capture more developer traffic.
- Adoption and data are the core moats for AI vendors; user behavior and proprietary prompts/feed data drive model improvement and pricing leverage.
- The industry is in a “free sample” phase where actual willingness to pay will determine future pricing and product strategies.
- Develop multi-tool workflows and portability so projects can move between Codex, Claude Code, Hermes, and others with minimal friction.
- Be cautious of over-dependence on a single tool; aim for resilient architectures that survive sudden shifts in provider availability.
Who Is This For?
Essential viewing for developers and ML engineers who want to understand the strategic dynamics of AI tooling wars, and for teams planning multi-tool workflows to avoid vendor lock-in.
Notable Quotes
""Codex is the best AI coding product, and we want to make it easy to try. For the next 30 days, we are giving companies that want to try switching over from Cloud Code 2 months of free Codeex usage.""
—Sam Altman’s tweet about Codex’s free usage period to lure users from Cloud Code, illustrating aggressive competitive tactics.
""50% extra usage on Cloud Code for the next 2 months.""
—Claude Code’s response showing the back-and-forth incentives to attract developer traffic.
""You are not the customer. You are the training data.""
—Herks’s provocative point about the business model relies on data and usage feeding model improvements.
""We are getting this stuff for very cheap, especially in the next 1 month for Codeex and two months for cloud code.""
—Observation about cost dynamics during the current free/sample period.
""Develop multi-tool workflows so projects can move between Codex, Claude Code, Hermes, to whatever’s next with minimal friction.""
—Practical takeaway urging resilience through tool portability.
Questions This Video Answers
- How is Anthropic’s adoption advantage affecting pricing and incentives for AI coding tools?
- What should developers consider when building workflows across Codex, Claude Code, and other coding assistants?
- Why is data the real moat for AI companies beyond model quality?
- Will the current free-month promotions translate into long-term price competition or vendor lock-in?
- How can a team create vendor-agnostic AI workflows to avoid disruption if a provider disappears?
Full Transcript
So today, for the first time ever, Anthropic has passed OpenAI in business adoption. And this research article dropped this morning. You can see the overall trend where OpenAI has been leading in business adoption since pretty much, you know, early 2023. But you can see right here in April of this year, Enthropic has now passed OpenAI. Right after that article dropped, Sam Alman tweeted, "Codex is the best AI coding product, and we want to make it easy to try. For the next 30 days, we are giving companies that want to try switching over from Cloud Code 2 months of free Codeex usage." This tweet dropped about an hour ago.
And then about 45 minutes after that tweet, we saw this one from Claude that said, "Claude Code weekly limits are increasing 50% all the way through July 13th." So that's 2 months from now. So Codeex says, "Hey, free codeex for a month." And Claude Code says, "Hey, you're going to get 50% extra usage on Cloud Code for the next 2 months." And I was reading these two tweets and I was like, that's pretty funny. I mean, they're obviously going right back and forth at each other. But this made me think about something else of the whole way that we should be thinking about AI.
And that's what I want to spend some time talking about with you guys today. And before you guys ask, I am currently working on a codeex versus cloud code video. So that will be coming very soon. Appreciate you guys' patience. So I have this document here which I'm calling the free sample phase. Kind of thinking about this AI coding war. So we got these two tweets, right? Codeex free extended cloud code usage for the next 2 months. And I want you to really think about, okay, let's say you're paying 200 bucks a month for cloud code or whatever amount you're paying.
The amount of output that you can actually get from 200 bucks a month of actually using cloud code every week hitting your limit is absolutely absurd. I'm not a formal software engineer or anything, but I guarantee you you could be getting that same amount of output from a full-time software engineer hire, which might be anywhere from 5 to 10 to 15K a month. And if you took these coding agents away from companies and from organizations, they would feel the pain because they have now gotten so used to defaulting to claude code or codeex for pretty much everything.
If you surveyed a ton of people, thousands of people that are using Claude Code every single day or Codex every single day and said, "Hey, how much would you actually pay for what you're getting out of this?" I would honestly be shocked if the vast majority of them said something less than 200 bucks. Like 200 bucks feels like a steal. So anyways, you are not the customer. You are the training data. Now, I obviously don't know this for a fact, but I've seen some conversation online and it really feels like we're kind of just in a free sample phase.
Because there are two major things that come to my mind when I think about what these companies need right now, which is adoption and data. Adoption obviously because they want people using their stuff. They want people to be addicted to their stuff, which I'm sure a bunch of you guys are addicted to the AI tools that you use every day to the point where if it got taken away from you or if the API is down or whatever, you feel the pain and you almost think like, how do I even work normally now? And that's exactly what they want you to feel.
And then of course the other thing is data. That proprietary data that they're getting is one of the most valuable resources to them. And ultimately it's probably the biggest moat because these tech companies that are trying to build better AI models that don't have data as far as how people are using it and how they converse and what they're asking the model to do better at. All of that data, all of those patterns are making the models better and better and better. And it's interesting to think about. We saw this tweet from Sam Alman, you know, back like a year and a half ago that basically said we're currently losing money on OpenAI Pro subscriptions.
People are using it much more than we expected. And we all know that if you took your typical usage for the month and you were routing that straight through API rather than using a, you know, fixed cost subscription, you would be paying so much more money, 5 to 25x more money on those tokens compared to what you're actually being charged on your subscription. And obviously these companies are eating costs on their own end. All of that compute that they have to actually use in order to send you a response back from their model, they're eating that cost.
and they're okay with it because right now they need the adoption and they need the data more than they need your 200 bucks a month. So yes, Anthropic rose 3.8% in April to 34.4% of businesses and OpenAI fell 2.9% to 32.3%. And overall adoption across businesses was still rising. Now this is purely an adoption graph and metric. This doesn't actually mean that Anthropic is the definitive leader in business adoption or that they have the best AI model or the best coding harness. This article pointed out a few other things like entropics incentives are misaligned with those of business customers.
They obviously make more money when more businesses use more tokens and they're incentivized to drive users to their more expensive models. We've also seen some other weird stuff like people saying that Claude has gotten worse as well as a bunch of stability problems with their compute and all of these new feature releases. And this isn't a new thing. If you always try to look at like what's happening in the industry or in your like line of work and look at the patterns across other areas of business and other like you know es flows of of cycles that we've seen in history.
This has happened with a lot of other things because the companies need adoption. Now obviously there's just like general inflation but basically the idea is like land grab the habit forms competition thins and then the reset. So things like Facebook ads have gotten way more expensive. Google AdWords, Uber, Door Dash, Netflix, AWS. There's lots of other things that go into the pricing for all of these businesses. So I'm not saying it's like a exact correlation and that's exactly what they did and that's exactly what OpenAI and Anthropic and all these other AI models are doing.
I'm just saying look back at some of these other patterns. I mean like this is exactly what I'm doing with my YouTube channel. I'm going to start charging for every single YouTube video I post ever. I'm just kidding. Wouldn't that be crazy though? So really what I'm trying to say is use it like crazy. Now, this bullet point I don't necessarily agree with because you also have to think like, okay, open source models are getting better. They're also getting smaller, which means that I'm going to be able to run them for cheaper. And I don't exactly know which way these closed source models are going to go as far as like pricing.
But still, what I know right now is we are getting this stuff for very cheap, especially in the next 1 month for Codeex and two months for cloud code. So, just use them both. I don't really know who's going to come out on top of this war. I don't know. It might not even be open AI or anthropic. But what I do know is that I'm going to start building my habits. I'm going to build my patterns. I'm going to build up a bunch of different projects that can move from Codeex to Claude Code to Hermes to OpenClaw to whatever's next.
And the ability to be able to have a project that is so flexible that if one day Anthropic just disappeared, like literally out of thin air just disappeared, if you could move everything over to a different tool in the matter of like an hour and the rest of your week is completely unchanged, that's a win. and you need to make sure you're setting yourself up in something like that so that you're not becoming extremely dependent on one thing. Now, this is just where I landed after I kind of sat with these two tweets and really thought about what's going on here.
I would love to hear in the comments if you guys have differing opinions. And I think that there's definitely room for some really great discussions around this. I'm not out here saying that everything that I just told you guys is 100% fact and 100% true besides like those actual metrics that I called out. You know, a lot of this is just my opinions and and what I feel about the space. So, please let me know if you guys disagree and why. Anyways, the closing frame that I had here was you're not paying 200 bucks a month for AI.
You're paying 200 bucks for 12 to 24month exemption from real prices. Now, that's me just kind of throwing something out there. I don't know if that's true, right? But like that's just where I feel we might be heading towards, right? Like that's not me saying that I know the strategy and I know what's going to happen, but it's something to think about. So anyways, I just wanted to come in here and talk about that real quick because I could almost feel some people looking at these two tweets and just getting a little bit more of that overwhelm or more of that panic.
And instead of approaching it as like, oh my gosh, like what do I do? These these tools are going at each other, just like think about it more like this is actually a blessing. I get to try more and more and I get to see what I like better for basically the same price. I don't have to pay anymore to do this. Now, I guess I don't exactly know when they say we're giving companies a free month of Codex usage. I don't exactly know like what qualifies for a company to get a free month of Codex usage, but still.
So, anyways, that's going to do it for this one. I know it was quick, but hopefully it made you think a little bit. And if you guys enjoyed, you learned something new, please give it a like. Anyways, I appreciate you guys making it to the end, and I'll see you in the next one. I che
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