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OpenAI: The Rival on the Same FrontierThin moat

Anthropic (ANT) — moat facet

The one frontier rival Anthropic names is the firm all seven of its founders walked out of, charges the same list prices to the cent, and is a co-defendant in the only lawsuit about the contest between them.

One competitor wants exactly what Anthropic wants: the same frontier, the same enterprise buyers, the same chips. The competition section names it precisely once, as OpenAI Group PBC, one of the primary competitors among model developers building for third-party software developers and enterprises1.

Claude Opus list price per million tokens ($)15Opus 5, input4Opus 5.5, input75Opus 5, output20Opus 5.5, outputAnthropic published API price list, October 2026
The frontier tier costs a quarter of what it did.

Then it names the same company over and over again in the management biographies. Dario Amodei was Vice President of Research at OpenAI from July 2016 to December 2020 and Daniela Amodei held positions there including Vice President of Safety and Policy until the same month; Tom Brown, now Anthropic's "Chief Compute Officer", "led the engineering of GPT-3 at OpenAI" and co-invented deep reinforcement learning from human feedback with Dario Amodei; Jack Clark "served as Policy Director at OpenAI"; and Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish and Chris Olah each came from research roles there2. All seven co-founders left one employer inside the same stretch of months to build a rival to it. The contest the filing calls one for talent began as a resignation letter.

Who is ahead depends on who counts, and the aspect page above gives all three readings. The one place a gap is wide is code: Menlo Ventures put enterprise coding spend at Anthropic 54% against OpenAI 21%, up from 42% six months earlier, in a report that marks Anthropic a portfolio company3. Scale is visible only through a shared supplier, where Amazon disclosed that OpenAI expanded an existing $38.0 billion commitment by $100.0 billion over 8.0 years in the first quarter of 2026 and Anthropic expanded its own by more than $100.0 billion over 10.0 years in the second4. CoreWeave serves both5.

What the two do not compete on is the sticker. Anthropic's list runs $10 and $50 per million input and output tokens for Fable 5.1, $4 and $20 for Opus 5.5, $2 and $10 for Sonnet 5.5 and $0.10 and $0.50 for Haiku 5.5, Opus having come down from $15 and $756. OpenAI's published list matches all four of those pairs to the cent7. Two companies spending tens of billions to beat each other have arrived at the same price card, which says neither expects to win by undercutting.

The sharpest evidence that the two are treated as a group rather than as opponents is the September 2026 class action naming Anthropic and "other developers of frontier AI models" for having "agreed to restrain competition by slowing the pace at which we develop and improve our respective AI models", which the subscriber page below takes up8. Read it beside Anthropic's own disclosure that it has proposed working with the government and other frontier developers on safety standards "including with respect to the pace of capability development", and suggested such work "may warrant a narrow exemption or safe harbor from antitrust laws"9. The company wants to coordinate with its rival on pace, and is being sued for it.

The two bid against each other for researchers as well as for chips, and what Anthropic pays for that is set out on the Moat pages. What settles this rivalry for an outside reader is narrower: Menlo Ventures put Anthropic at 40% of enterprise LLM API spend against OpenAI at 27%, from 24% a year earlier10. A disinterested survey showing that gap closed would say more than any model launch, and the matched price cards would start moving apart with it.

Moat trajectory: Holding steady

List prices identical to the cent; coding share wide, overall adoption disputed.

The number that tests this moat
Third-party estimate
Enterprise LLM API spend share
40% against OpenAI 27% (December 2025); 24% a year earlier

The head-to-head measure on spending rather than on benchmarks; it was published by Menlo Ventures, an Anthropic investor, and has not been updated since, so a disinterested survey showing the gap closed would matter more than any model release.

Source: Menlo Ventures enterprise AI survey ↗
References
  1. ReportedThe competition section names it precisely once, as OpenAI Group PBC, one of the primary competitors among model developers building for third-party software developers and enterprises.
    Anthropic, PBC, Form S-1 registration statement (Registration No. 333-299633), filed 26 October 2026 - revenue $41M (2023), $386M (2024), $4,585M (2025), $1,163M (H1 2025) and $16,286M (H1 2026); operating loss $(551)M, $(2,980)M, $(8,060)M, $(2,135)M and $(693)M; net loss $(1,531)M, $(8,309)M, $(41,965)M, $(12,969)M and $(80,748)M, after a change in the fair value of convertible notes, derivative liabilities and SAFEs of $(72,388)M in the first half of 2026; net loss per share $(1.42), $(5.43), $(23.04), $(7.25) and $(39.88); operating expenses in the first half of 2026 of compute and infrastructure $8,945M, personnel $3,152M, sales, marketing and partnerships $3,168M and other operating and administrative $1,714M, presented by nature with no cost-of-revenue line on the face of the statement, while Note 8 regroups the same expenses by function and gives cost of revenue of $26M, $752M, $2,773M, $1,019M and $2,380M against research and development of $422M, $2,275M, $6,338M, $1,850M and $9,741M; a Bartz settlement line of $1,500M in 2025; interest income $1,111M in the first half of 2026; revenue by geography United States $34M, $263M, $3,362M, $820M and $11,763M and International $7M, $123M, $1,223M, $343M and $4,523M; total assets $147,358M, cash and short-term investments $131,651M, accounts receivable $5,833M, convertible notes payable $108,566M, redeemable convertible preferred stock $157,510M and a total stockholders' deficit of $(127,619)M at 30 June 2026; 853,394 thousand preferred, 2,157,398 thousand Class A and 30,643 thousand Class N shares outstanding at that date; Net Revenue Retention of approximately 900 % and more than 11,900 customers above $100,000 of trailing revenue at 30 September 2026, up from more than 950 a year earlier, with more than 1,900 above $1 million and approximately 250 above $10 million; over 50% of the Fortune 500 and over 30% of the Global 2000 among them, Anthropic's revenue averaging less than 0.1% of those Fortune 500 customers' total expenses; revenue through cloud service provider marketplaces of 11% (2023), 32% (2024), 47% (2025), 44% (H1 2025) and 48% (H1 2026); $20,000M, $15,000M and $42,000M of undrawn committed note purchase agreements with Google, Amazon and an infrastructure partner; non-cancelable purchase commitments of $54,559M at 31 December 2025 rising to approximately $265.6 billion at 30 June 2026 with terms of one to 20 years, plus leases not yet commenced of approximately $50.2 billion and $321.4 billion at those dates, and named commitments of about $161.2 billion of Broadcom equipment leases, up to $120.5 billion with SpaceX.AI LLC for NVIDIA GPU compute, at least about $114.5 billion with Google, at least $110.0 billion with Amazon, up to about $44.6 billion with Nscale and at least $44.9 billion with Microsoft; a $1.5 billion Bartz copyright settlement approved by the district court in July 2026; a September 2026 Sherman Act class action alleging the frontier developers agreed to slow the pace of model improvement; a Department of War supply-chain risk designation under Section 4713 upheld 2-1 by the D.C. Circuit on 25 September 2026 with a petition for rehearing en banc pending, and June 2026 Commerce export restrictions that led Anthropic to disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for every customer; over 90% of contributions to its own codebase written by Claude in September 2026; one share of Class T common stock electing a majority of the board, Class A voting power capped at 49.9%, and Amazon and Google each holding more than five percent of capital stock while appearing in no row of the beneficial-ownership table, which covers voting securities only; and the statement that prior to the offering there has been no public market for the Class A common stock - the business section: the mission, the core advantages, the enterprise strategy and the partner programmes. — 2023 to 30 September 2026 · publ. 26 October 2026 · source ↗
  2. ReportedDario Amodei was Vice President of Research at OpenAI from July 2016 to December 2020 and Daniela Amodei held positions there including Vice President of Safety and Policy until the same month; Tom Brown, now Anthropic's "Chief Compute Officer", "led the engineering of GPT-3 at OpenAI" and co-invented deep reinforcement learning from human feedback with Dario Amodei; Jack Clark "served as Policy Director at OpenAI"; and Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish and Chris Olah each came from research roles there.
    Anthropic, PBC, Form S-1 registration statement (Registration No. 333-299633), filed 26 October 2026 - revenue $41M (2023), $386M (2024), $4,585M (2025), $1,163M (H1 2025) and $16,286M (H1 2026); operating loss $(551)M, $(2,980)M, $(8,060)M, $(2,135)M and $(693)M; net loss $(1,531)M, $(8,309)M, $(41,965)M, $(12,969)M and $(80,748)M, after a change in the fair value of convertible notes, derivative liabilities and SAFEs of $(72,388)M in the first half of 2026; net loss per share $(1.42), $(5.43), $(23.04), $(7.25) and $(39.88); operating expenses in the first half of 2026 of compute and infrastructure $8,945M, personnel $3,152M, sales, marketing and partnerships $3,168M and other operating and administrative $1,714M, presented by nature with no cost-of-revenue line on the face of the statement, while Note 8 regroups the same expenses by function and gives cost of revenue of $26M, $752M, $2,773M, $1,019M and $2,380M against research and development of $422M, $2,275M, $6,338M, $1,850M and $9,741M; a Bartz settlement line of $1,500M in 2025; interest income $1,111M in the first half of 2026; revenue by geography United States $34M, $263M, $3,362M, $820M and $11,763M and International $7M, $123M, $1,223M, $343M and $4,523M; total assets $147,358M, cash and short-term investments $131,651M, accounts receivable $5,833M, convertible notes payable $108,566M, redeemable convertible preferred stock $157,510M and a total stockholders' deficit of $(127,619)M at 30 June 2026; 853,394 thousand preferred, 2,157,398 thousand Class A and 30,643 thousand Class N shares outstanding at that date; Net Revenue Retention of approximately 900 % and more than 11,900 customers above $100,000 of trailing revenue at 30 September 2026, up from more than 950 a year earlier, with more than 1,900 above $1 million and approximately 250 above $10 million; over 50% of the Fortune 500 and over 30% of the Global 2000 among them, Anthropic's revenue averaging less than 0.1% of those Fortune 500 customers' total expenses; revenue through cloud service provider marketplaces of 11% (2023), 32% (2024), 47% (2025), 44% (H1 2025) and 48% (H1 2026); $20,000M, $15,000M and $42,000M of undrawn committed note purchase agreements with Google, Amazon and an infrastructure partner; non-cancelable purchase commitments of $54,559M at 31 December 2025 rising to approximately $265.6 billion at 30 June 2026 with terms of one to 20 years, plus leases not yet commenced of approximately $50.2 billion and $321.4 billion at those dates, and named commitments of about $161.2 billion of Broadcom equipment leases, up to $120.5 billion with SpaceX.AI LLC for NVIDIA GPU compute, at least about $114.5 billion with Google, at least $110.0 billion with Amazon, up to about $44.6 billion with Nscale and at least $44.9 billion with Microsoft; a $1.5 billion Bartz copyright settlement approved by the district court in July 2026; a September 2026 Sherman Act class action alleging the frontier developers agreed to slow the pace of model improvement; a Department of War supply-chain risk designation under Section 4713 upheld 2-1 by the D.C. Circuit on 25 September 2026 with a petition for rehearing en banc pending, and June 2026 Commerce export restrictions that led Anthropic to disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for every customer; over 90% of contributions to its own codebase written by Claude in September 2026; one share of Class T common stock electing a majority of the board, Class A voting power capped at 49.9%, and Amazon and Google each holding more than five percent of capital stock while appearing in no row of the beneficial-ownership table, which covers voting securities only; and the statement that prior to the offering there has been no public market for the Class A common stock - the public benefit corporation structure, the Long-Term Benefit Trust and the description of capital stock. — 2023 to 30 September 2026 · publ. 26 October 2026 · source ↗
  3. Third-party estimateThe one place a gap is wide is code: Menlo Ventures put enterprise coding spend at Anthropic 54% against OpenAI 21%, up from 42% six months earlier, in a report that marks Anthropic a portfolio company.
    Menlo Ventures, The State of Generative AI in the Enterprise, December 2025 - enterprise LLM API spend shares of Anthropic 40%, OpenAI 27% and Google 21%, with Anthropic up from 24% a year earlier and 12% in 2023 and OpenAI down from 50% in 2023; enterprise coding Anthropic 54% against OpenAI 21%, up from 42% six months earlier; Google, OpenAI and Anthropic together 88% of enterprise LLM API usage with the remaining 12% spread across Meta Llama, Cohere, Mistral and a long tail; Google rose from 7% in 2023 to 21% in 2025; enterprise open-source share declined "from 19% last year to 11% today" and open-source LLMs "hold only 11% of today's market"; Chinese open-weight models "account for just 1% of total LLM API usage (roughly 10% of enterprise open-source)"; enterprise LLM spend $3.5bn in November 2024 and $8.4bn by mid-2025. Based on a survey of 495 US enterprise AI decision-makers conducted 7-25 November 2025, measuring estimated dollars spent on production API usage. Menlo Ventures is an investor in Anthropic and marks it a portfolio company in the report. — December 2025 · publ. December 2025 · source ↗
  4. ReportedScale is visible only through a shared supplier, where Amazon disclosed that OpenAI expanded an existing $38.0 billion commitment by $100.0 billion over 8.0 years in the first quarter of 2026 and Anthropic expanded its own by more than $100.0 billion over 10.0 years in the second.
    Amazon.com Inc., Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026 — purchases of property and equipment $54,208M in Q2 2026; remaining performance obligations of approximately $496 billion (weighted-average remaining life 6.4 years), after OpenAI expanded its existing $38.0 billion commitment by $100.0 billion over 8.0 years in Q1 2026 and Anthropic expanded its commitment by more than $100.0 billion over 10.0 years in Q2 2026; upward adjustments to private equity investments of $50.5 billion in Q2 2026 and $62.8 billion in the six months, primarily nonvoting preferred stock in Anthropic; about $640 million of IEEPA tariff refunds recorded mainly as a reduction to cost of sales; shipping costs $27.9 billion against $23.4 billion — Q2 2026 — quarter ended June 30, 2026 · publ. July 2026 · source ↗
  5. Third-party estimateCoreWeave serves both.
    Forbes — CoreWeave's Meta and Anthropic agreements leave it serving every major AI lab (Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI and Google) — April 2026 · publ. April 13, 2026 · source ↗
  6. ReportedAnthropic's list runs $10 and $50 per million input and output tokens for Fable 5.1, $4 and $20 for Opus 5.5, $2 and $10 for Sonnet 5.5 and $0.10 and $0.50 for Haiku 5.5, Opus having come down from $15 and $75.
    Anthropic published API price list - Fable 5.1 at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output, Opus 5.5 at $4 and $20, Sonnet 5.5 at $2 and $10 and Haiku 5.5 at $0.10 and $0.50, with prompt caching reducing cost by up to about 97% and latency by up to about 60%. Opus pricing fell from $15 and $75 per million tokens. — October 2026 · publ. October 2026 · source ↗
  7. ReportedOpenAI's published list matches all four of those pairs to the cent.
    OpenAI published API price list - gpt-6-astra at $10.00 per million input tokens and $50.00 per million output, gpt-5.6-sol at $4.00 and $20.00, gpt-6.1-sol at $2.00 and $10.00 and gpt-6-luna at $0.10 and $0.50, matching Anthropic list prices at all four tiers to the cent. — October 2026 · publ. October 2026 · source ↗
  8. ReportedThe sharpest evidence that the two are treated as a group rather than as opponents is the September 2026 class action naming Anthropic and "other developers of frontier AI models" for having "agreed to restrain competition by slowing the pace at which we develop and improve our respective AI models", which the subscriber page below takes up.
    Anthropic, PBC, Form S-1 registration statement (Registration No. 333-299633), filed 26 October 2026 - revenue $41M (2023), $386M (2024), $4,585M (2025), $1,163M (H1 2025) and $16,286M (H1 2026); operating loss $(551)M, $(2,980)M, $(8,060)M, $(2,135)M and $(693)M; net loss $(1,531)M, $(8,309)M, $(41,965)M, $(12,969)M and $(80,748)M, after a change in the fair value of convertible notes, derivative liabilities and SAFEs of $(72,388)M in the first half of 2026; net loss per share $(1.42), $(5.43), $(23.04), $(7.25) and $(39.88); operating expenses in the first half of 2026 of compute and infrastructure $8,945M, personnel $3,152M, sales, marketing and partnerships $3,168M and other operating and administrative $1,714M, presented by nature with no cost-of-revenue line on the face of the statement, while Note 8 regroups the same expenses by function and gives cost of revenue of $26M, $752M, $2,773M, $1,019M and $2,380M against research and development of $422M, $2,275M, $6,338M, $1,850M and $9,741M; a Bartz settlement line of $1,500M in 2025; interest income $1,111M in the first half of 2026; revenue by geography United States $34M, $263M, $3,362M, $820M and $11,763M and International $7M, $123M, $1,223M, $343M and $4,523M; total assets $147,358M, cash and short-term investments $131,651M, accounts receivable $5,833M, convertible notes payable $108,566M, redeemable convertible preferred stock $157,510M and a total stockholders' deficit of $(127,619)M at 30 June 2026; 853,394 thousand preferred, 2,157,398 thousand Class A and 30,643 thousand Class N shares outstanding at that date; Net Revenue Retention of approximately 900 % and more than 11,900 customers above $100,000 of trailing revenue at 30 September 2026, up from more than 950 a year earlier, with more than 1,900 above $1 million and approximately 250 above $10 million; over 50% of the Fortune 500 and over 30% of the Global 2000 among them, Anthropic's revenue averaging less than 0.1% of those Fortune 500 customers' total expenses; revenue through cloud service provider marketplaces of 11% (2023), 32% (2024), 47% (2025), 44% (H1 2025) and 48% (H1 2026); $20,000M, $15,000M and $42,000M of undrawn committed note purchase agreements with Google, Amazon and an infrastructure partner; non-cancelable purchase commitments of $54,559M at 31 December 2025 rising to approximately $265.6 billion at 30 June 2026 with terms of one to 20 years, plus leases not yet commenced of approximately $50.2 billion and $321.4 billion at those dates, and named commitments of about $161.2 billion of Broadcom equipment leases, up to $120.5 billion with SpaceX.AI LLC for NVIDIA GPU compute, at least about $114.5 billion with Google, at least $110.0 billion with Amazon, up to about $44.6 billion with Nscale and at least $44.9 billion with Microsoft; a $1.5 billion Bartz copyright settlement approved by the district court in July 2026; a September 2026 Sherman Act class action alleging the frontier developers agreed to slow the pace of model improvement; a Department of War supply-chain risk designation under Section 4713 upheld 2-1 by the D.C. Circuit on 25 September 2026 with a petition for rehearing en banc pending, and June 2026 Commerce export restrictions that led Anthropic to disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for every customer; over 90% of contributions to its own codebase written by Claude in September 2026; one share of Class T common stock electing a majority of the board, Class A voting power capped at 49.9%, and Amazon and Google each holding more than five percent of capital stock while appearing in no row of the beneficial-ownership table, which covers voting securities only; and the statement that prior to the offering there has been no public market for the Class A common stock - legal proceedings and the intellectual-property risk factors. — 2023 to 30 September 2026 · publ. 26 October 2026 · source ↗
  9. ReportedRead it beside Anthropic's own disclosure that it has proposed working with the government and other frontier developers on safety standards "including with respect to the pace of capability development", and suggested such work "may warrant a narrow exemption or safe harbor from antitrust laws".
    Anthropic, PBC, Form S-1 registration statement (Registration No. 333-299633), filed 26 October 2026 - revenue $41M (2023), $386M (2024), $4,585M (2025), $1,163M (H1 2025) and $16,286M (H1 2026); operating loss $(551)M, $(2,980)M, $(8,060)M, $(2,135)M and $(693)M; net loss $(1,531)M, $(8,309)M, $(41,965)M, $(12,969)M and $(80,748)M, after a change in the fair value of convertible notes, derivative liabilities and SAFEs of $(72,388)M in the first half of 2026; net loss per share $(1.42), $(5.43), $(23.04), $(7.25) and $(39.88); operating expenses in the first half of 2026 of compute and infrastructure $8,945M, personnel $3,152M, sales, marketing and partnerships $3,168M and other operating and administrative $1,714M, presented by nature with no cost-of-revenue line on the face of the statement, while Note 8 regroups the same expenses by function and gives cost of revenue of $26M, $752M, $2,773M, $1,019M and $2,380M against research and development of $422M, $2,275M, $6,338M, $1,850M and $9,741M; a Bartz settlement line of $1,500M in 2025; interest income $1,111M in the first half of 2026; revenue by geography United States $34M, $263M, $3,362M, $820M and $11,763M and International $7M, $123M, $1,223M, $343M and $4,523M; total assets $147,358M, cash and short-term investments $131,651M, accounts receivable $5,833M, convertible notes payable $108,566M, redeemable convertible preferred stock $157,510M and a total stockholders' deficit of $(127,619)M at 30 June 2026; 853,394 thousand preferred, 2,157,398 thousand Class A and 30,643 thousand Class N shares outstanding at that date; Net Revenue Retention of approximately 900 % and more than 11,900 customers above $100,000 of trailing revenue at 30 September 2026, up from more than 950 a year earlier, with more than 1,900 above $1 million and approximately 250 above $10 million; over 50% of the Fortune 500 and over 30% of the Global 2000 among them, Anthropic's revenue averaging less than 0.1% of those Fortune 500 customers' total expenses; revenue through cloud service provider marketplaces of 11% (2023), 32% (2024), 47% (2025), 44% (H1 2025) and 48% (H1 2026); $20,000M, $15,000M and $42,000M of undrawn committed note purchase agreements with Google, Amazon and an infrastructure partner; non-cancelable purchase commitments of $54,559M at 31 December 2025 rising to approximately $265.6 billion at 30 June 2026 with terms of one to 20 years, plus leases not yet commenced of approximately $50.2 billion and $321.4 billion at those dates, and named commitments of about $161.2 billion of Broadcom equipment leases, up to $120.5 billion with SpaceX.AI LLC for NVIDIA GPU compute, at least about $114.5 billion with Google, at least $110.0 billion with Amazon, up to about $44.6 billion with Nscale and at least $44.9 billion with Microsoft; a $1.5 billion Bartz copyright settlement approved by the district court in July 2026; a September 2026 Sherman Act class action alleging the frontier developers agreed to slow the pace of model improvement; a Department of War supply-chain risk designation under Section 4713 upheld 2-1 by the D.C. Circuit on 25 September 2026 with a petition for rehearing en banc pending, and June 2026 Commerce export restrictions that led Anthropic to disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for every customer; over 90% of contributions to its own codebase written by Claude in September 2026; one share of Class T common stock electing a majority of the board, Class A voting power capped at 49.9%, and Amazon and Google each holding more than five percent of capital stock while appearing in no row of the beneficial-ownership table, which covers voting securities only; and the statement that prior to the offering there has been no public market for the Class A common stock - legal proceedings and the intellectual-property risk factors. — 2023 to 30 September 2026 · publ. 26 October 2026 · source ↗
  10. Third-party estimateWhat settles this rivalry for an outside reader is narrower: Menlo Ventures put Anthropic at 40% of enterprise LLM API spend against OpenAI at 27%, from 24% a year earlier.
    Menlo Ventures, The State of Generative AI in the Enterprise, December 2025 - enterprise LLM API spend shares of Anthropic 40%, OpenAI 27% and Google 21%, with Anthropic up from 24% a year earlier and 12% in 2023 and OpenAI down from 50% in 2023; enterprise coding Anthropic 54% against OpenAI 21%, up from 42% six months earlier; Google, OpenAI and Anthropic together 88% of enterprise LLM API usage with the remaining 12% spread across Meta Llama, Cohere, Mistral and a long tail; Google rose from 7% in 2023 to 21% in 2025; enterprise open-source share declined "from 19% last year to 11% today" and open-source LLMs "hold only 11% of today's market"; Chinese open-weight models "account for just 1% of total LLM API usage (roughly 10% of enterprise open-source)"; enterprise LLM spend $3.5bn in November 2024 and $8.4bn by mid-2025. Based on a survey of 495 US enterprise AI decision-makers conducted 7-25 November 2025, measuring estimated dollars spent on production API usage. Menlo Ventures is an investor in Anthropic and marks it a portfolio company in the report. — December 2025 · publ. December 2025 · source ↗
Sources
Generated October 26, 2026