Hi there,

October has been a defining month for enterprise AI, with the two leading labs making radically different bets on the future. While OpenAI is turning ChatGPT into an app platform, Anthropic is quietly winning the enterprise trust game—and the numbers tell a compelling story.

OpenAI Bets Big on the Platform Play

At DevDay 2025, OpenAI unveiled what might be its most ambitious vision yet: transforming ChatGPT from a chatbot into a full-fledged operating system. The company announced the Apps SDK, allowing developers to build interactive applications that run directly inside ChatGPT conversations—think Canva creating designs, Zillow showing property maps, or Coursera streaming educational videos, all without leaving the chat interface.

The scale OpenAI shared is staggering: 800 million weekly active users (up from 700 million just one month prior), 4 million developers building on the platform, and 8 billion API requests per minute. They also launched GPT-5 Pro for complex reasoning tasks and made Sora 2 available via API for the first time.

My take: This is textbook platform strategy—build massive distribution first, then let developers monetize on your infrastructure. It’s the iOS playbook, but for AI. The risk? OpenAI is spreading itself thin, trying to be a research lab, consumer product, developer platform, and now an app store, all at once.

Anthropic Plays the Long Game with Enterprise Trust

While OpenAI grabbed headlines, Anthropic made what might be a more significant move: deploying Claude across all 470,000 Deloitte employees in 150+ countries—the largest enterprise AI deployment in history. This isn’t just a licensing deal; Deloitte is establishing a Claude Center of Excellence and certifying 15,000 professionals on the platform.

Why does this matter? According to recent data, Anthropic already commands 32% of enterprise LLM usage versus OpenAI’s 25%, and Claude dominates coding applications with 42% market share. When a Big Four consulting firm commits to deploying AI to nearly half a million employees globally, it signals that AI has moved from experimentation to operational necessity.

My take: Anthropic is winning where it counts—in regulated industries that need reliability over novelty. While OpenAI is building an ecosystem for consumer apps, Anthropic is becoming the default choice for enterprises that can’t afford AI hallucinations in their compliance reports or financial analyses.

The Infrastructure Arms Race Continues

Behind the scenes, the real story is about chips and scale. OpenAI and AMD announced a partnership to deploy 6 gigawatts of AI infrastructure, with AMD potentially securing tens of billions in revenue. Meanwhile, Samsung is posting record profits thanks to soaring memory chip demand driven by AI—DRAM prices jumped 171.8% year-over-year as companies race to build larger model training clusters.

What This Means for You

We’re entering a bifurcated AI market:

• Consumer-facing apps will increasingly be built on OpenAI’s platform, leveraging its massive user base and ease of integration
• Enterprise and compliance-critical applications will lean toward Anthropic, where reliability and interpretability matter more than cutting-edge features

For developers and businesses, the choice is becoming clearer: If you’re building for scale and consumer adoption, OpenAI’s ecosystem offers unmatched distribution. If you’re operating in regulated industries or need to explain your AI’s decisions, Anthropic’s approach makes more sense.

The most interesting companies in 2026 won’t be the ones choosing a single platform—they’ll be the ones smart enough to use both strategically.

One more thing: As these platforms mature, we’re seeing early signs of concern about circular AI deals and potential bubble dynamics reminiscent of the dot-com era. NBC News published an investigation highlighting questionable financial arrangements between Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle, and CoreWeave. Something to watch.

Stay curious,
The AI Now Team