Milk Road AI Anthropic’s Rise: Is OpenAI Losing Its Lead? w/ Patrick & Duncan
Jan 30, 2026
A deep dive on Anthropic’s surge: big fundraising, enterprise traction, and a potential compute lead in 2026. A close comparison of Anthropic and OpenAI on valuation, product vibe, and data center strategy. Discussions on world models, robotics progress, and how multimodal advances could reshape training. Political and financial pressures on leading AI firms also surface as a running theme.
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Anthropic’s Momentum Shifts The Narrative
- Anthropic is gaining momentum with large fundraising and enterprise traction, shifting the AI narrative away from OpenAI.
- Their conservative spending and strong revenue focus could give them a compute lead in 2026.
Apple Engineers Prefer Claude Internally
- Patrick says Apple's internal operations reportedly use Claude for tooling despite Siri choosing Gemini.
- Negotiation friction led Apple to pick Google publicly while engineers preferred Claude internally.
Joy Versus Raw Capability In Models
- Duncan finds Claude more enjoyable and collaborative while GPT-5.2 Codex has stronger raw execution for engineering tasks.
- The tradeoff between 'joy' and raw capability shapes which model users pick for different workflows.