OpenAI spread itself across everything — and missed AI coding, which Anthropic claimed

OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT in November 2022 and is widely credited with starting the AI boom, now has to catch up with rival Anthropic in a key B2B segment: AI tools for developers, 3DNews reports.

Why the pioneer lost pace

ChatGPT's release put OpenAI at the center of global attention and made it the technology leader. According to 3DNews, that is exactly where its strategic problem began. With unprecedented momentum behind it, OpenAI started expanding in several directions at once: it updated the consumer ChatGPT, launched voice interfaces, developed the Sora video generator, built out the GPT Store plugin marketplace, and built corporate partnerships with Microsoft worth tens of billions of dollars.

Expansion on that scale demanded enormous resources — engineering, management and marketing. As a result, the company did not focus in time on a category 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 of OpenAI's rise and the difficulties that followed:

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

How Anthropic captured the developer market

Anthropic, an AI company founded in 2021 by a team of OpenAI alumni, chose a different strategy from the start. According to 3DNews, the company "saw the potential in code-writing automation tools in time" and focused consistently on that niche.

Developer tools are an especially valuable segment of the AI market. Programmers are the first to adopt new technologies, shape opinion inside corporations and influence purchasing 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 taken a prominent position in the AI-assisted programming market. Enterprise customers looking for a predictable tool for development teams found at Anthropic what OpenAI had not managed to offer.

"OpenAI was literally grabbing at everything," is how the 3DNews

editorial team characterizes the company's strategy as it explains the missed market opportunities.

The irony is that OpenAI itself created the language models on which the world's best code-writing tools could be built. But technical superiority did not make up for a lack of strategic focus.

What this means

The OpenAI–Anthropic standoff 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: multibillion-dollar funding, a top-tier engineering team and the largest user base among AI products. But Anthropic has gained a notable head start in reputation and product depth precisely where corporate budgets are most willing to go in 2026: tools that raise developer productivity. The outcome of the competition will be determined by the next product decisions of both companies.