OpenAI распылилась на всё подряд — и упустила AI-кодинг, который захватила Anthropic

OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT in November 2022 and formally kicked off the AI systems boom, is today forced to catch up with rival Anthropic in a key B2B segment — AI tools for developers, as reported by 3DNews.

Why the pioneer lost momentum

The launch of ChatGPT placed OpenAI at the center of global attention and gave the company the status of a technology leader. This, according to 3DNews's assessment, became the source of a strategic problem. Having gained unprecedented momentum, OpenAI began expanding simultaneously in several directions: updating consumer ChatGPT, launching voice interfaces, developing the Sora video generation system, building the GPT Store plugin marketplace, and establishing corporate partnerships with Microsoft worth tens of billions of dollars.

Such breadth of expansion required enormous resources — engineering, managerial, and marketing. As a result, the company failed to focus in time on the segment that by 2025–2026 had become one of the main drivers of B2B revenue in the AI industry: specialized tools for automating code writing.

Key milestones in OpenAI's rise and the difficulties that followed:

• November 2022 — launch of ChatGPT, 1 million users in the first 5 days
• January 2023 — 100 million active users within 2 months of launch
• 2023–2024 — parallel launch of Sora, GPT Store, expanded voice features, and ChatGPT Enterprise
• According to 3DNews, the strategy of "grabbing everything at once" resulted in the loss of key market opportunities

How Anthropic captured the developer market

AI company Anthropic, founded in 2021 by a team of former OpenAI employees, chose a different strategy from the outset. According to 3DNews's assessment, the company "saw the potential in code automation tools in time" and consistently focused on this niche.

Developer tools represent a particularly valuable segment of the AI market. Programmers are the first to adopt new technologies, shape opinion within corporations, and influence procurement decisions. By winning developers' trust, Anthropic gained an organic path to large B2B contracts.

The bet paid off: Anthropic built a specialized API ecosystem and the Claude Code product, which by 2026 had secured notable positions in the AI-assisted programming market. Corporate clients looking for a reliable tool for their development teams found at Anthropic what OpenAI had not managed to offer.

"OpenAI was literally grabbing at everything at once," — this is how

3DNews's editors characterize the company's strategy, explaining the reasons for missed market opportunities.

The irony of the situation is that it was precisely OpenAI that created the language models on the basis of which the world's best code-writing tools could have been built. But technical superiority did not compensate for strategic dispersion.

What this means

The dynamic between OpenAI and Anthropic is an instructive example of how market leadership does not protect against losing specific segments when expansion is too broad. OpenAI has the resources for a comeback: multi-billion-dollar funding, a top-tier engineering team, and the largest user base among AI products. But Anthropic has gained a significant head start in reputation and product depth precisely where corporate budgets in 2026 are most willingly allocated — in tools that enhance developer productivity. The outcome of the competition will be determined by the next product decisions of both companies.