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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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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

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While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

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

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

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