Anthropic ran a Super Bowl ad mocking OpenAI for putting ads in ChatGPT. Altman fired back on X calling Anthropic "authoritarian." OpenAI poached an Anthropic safety researcher the same week it shipped a product that looks like a direct response to Claude Code. The whole thing has the energy of two restaurants opening across the street from each other and spending more time reading each other's menus than cooking.

These companies have genuinely different strengths. Anthropic owns 40% of enterprise LLM spend and builds tools developers actually trust with production code. OpenAI has consumer reach nobody else touches and multimodal ambitions that stretch well beyond text. Both positions are defensible. Neither requires obsessing over what the other shipped on Tuesday.

I wrote about speed becoming the only moat last month. The same logic applies to rivalry as a strategy — it narrows your field of vision to exactly one competitor while the market fragments around you. Meta, Google, and a dozen open-source efforts don't care about your Super Bowl ad.

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