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OpenAI is shipping everything. Anthropic is perfecting one thing.

The two AI titans are in a race to grow revenues, but they have very different strategies for releasing products. And one approach appears to be winning out.

Jon Keegan

3/18/26 3:45PM

OpenAI and Anthropic are locked in a fierce battle to secure substantial new revenue streams to help realize their AI dreams of unlocking artificial general intelligence.

The rival startups are cut from different cloths — Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI researchers who left to realize their alternative vision for safe AI. But after the past few years of intense competition, the startups are both pursuing the same prize: deep, reliable streams of enterprise revenue.

OpenAI has boasted of releasing “a new feature or capability roughly every three days.” Indeed, the list of products that OpenAI has launched in the past year is dizzying. In addition to more than a dozen versions of its GPT models, Open AI has released:

🧑🏼‍💻 Codex – an AI coding tool
🌎 Atlas – an AI-powered web browser
🎥 Sora – a text-to-video generation app
🤖 Operator – a web-browsing agent
👀 ChatGPT Agent – another web-browsing agent
🗣️ Whisper – an automatic speech recognition system for transcription
🌅 DALL-E – a text-to-image generator
🔎 ChatGPT Search – an AI-powered search engine
📰 ChatGPT Pulse – an AI-powered news aggregator
🧪 Prism – an AI-powered workspace for scientists
🩻 ChatGPT Health – a dedicated experience in ChatGPT for health and wellness

Compare that to Anthropic, which has been busy making its Claude chatbot better at spreadsheets, financial analysis, and slide decks — not exactly sexy AI superpowers, but the bread and butter of real work in businesses large and small. The company only has a few products sitting alongside Claude:

⚙️ Claude Code – a popular agentic coding tool
🖥️ Claude Cowork – a desktop AI agent

Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s new head of applications, told staff last week that they needed to focus their efforts on products for coding and enterprise, and not get distracted by “side quests,” according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

To get a sense of the cadence of these two startups’ product releases, we analyzed every press release from their company website and categorized them. When you lay them out on a timeline, you can see how different the product release cycles are for the two companies.

OpenAI and Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

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