At the HumanX AI conference in San Francisco this week, thousands of techies descended upon the city’s Moscone Center, where discussion focused on the ways agentic AI is changing the business. Agents, which automate business and coding tasks, have begun to be deployed across industries — largely through enterprise and consumer-focused chatbots.
Naturally, I wanted to know which chatbot was the most popular, and I consistently heard one name most often: Claude.
Anthropic got shoutouts in many of the panels held throughout the week, but it also was a topic of discussion with the vendors I spoke to while perusing the convention room floor. The chatbot I didn’t hear a lot about? ChatGPT. One of the vendors I spoke to made a point of telling me that he and his team used Claude a lot, while he felt ChatGPT and OpenAI had gone downhill — or, as the internet likes to say, “fell off.”
Lately, that does not appear to be a particularly unique take. Indeed, it’s not clear what will cure the perception that, despite a recent $122 billion funding round and its upcoming IPO, OpenAI has lost its footing—or, at the very least, seems increasingly unsure of what the next step is.
Part of the problem may be a perception that the company lacks focus. Last month, OpenAI abandoned a number of long simmering side-quests (including its AI video generator Sora and a troubled plan to launch a “sexy” version of ChatGPT), locking in instead on the focuses of business and coding services. In the meantime, a number of developments, including a recent New Yorker piece that questioned whether the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, was trustworthy or not, have spurred a certain amount of negative buzz around the company. The company’s work with the Trump administration hasn’t won it any friends either, nor has its decision to inject advertising into ChatGPT.
During one of HumanX’s discussions, Sierra co-founder and CEO Bret Taylor (who is also the chairman of the board of OpenAI) defended Altman when asked by Alex Heath about the New Yorker profile. “I think Sam is one of the most visible leaders and executives in the world,” said Taylor. “If you want to seek out detractors for him, you’ll find them, and they’ll be very vocal about it,” he said, adding: “I think Sam’s remarkable. I think he’s a remarkable leader of AI, and I really trust his character as someone who’s worked with him.”
The controversies and vacillations can make OpenAI’s seem reactive rather than strategic, as if it’s simply responding to events rather than shaping them. That said, when it comes to prominence and revenue, OpenAI and Anthropic are neck and neck — or at least, that’s how it looks, with some data suggesting that Anthropic is catching up among business users. The Wall Street Journal recently analyzed their finances, showing that the two companies were “the fastest-growing businesses in the history of tech.” In that sense, perhaps “falling off” for OpenAI just means it’s not the undisputed champ anymore. It has competition — which, in most industries, is normal.
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If anything, it remains clear that OpenAI is determined to do what it takes to remain dominant. This week, the company announced a new $100 subscription tier to ChatGPT with substantially more access to Codex, its coding tool. The move seems clearly designed to spur broader use of tool while hopefully peeling users away from Claude Code.
During a HumanX discussion with Bloomberg’s reporter Rachel Metz, OpenAI CTO of B2B applications Srinivas Narayanan noted how quickly the technological landscape has been changing.
“We are in this incredible moment in technology, where every month, and sometimes every day, we are all looking forward to something new,” Narayanan said. Pointing to agentic coding as an example, he added, “We knew AI was going to impact software engineering, people have been using assistive coding over the last year, but even in just the last few months, the entire field has changed.”
Agentic accomplishments may be a big focus of the tech community currently, since other applications for AI (creative uses, for example) haven’t really panned out yet. Still, the amount of work that companies have begun to offload onto their new little automated helpers is somewhat surprising—and, as Narayanan noted in his remarks, it has all happened in a relatively short period of time. In such an unpredictable environment, the future is still wide open.