I disagree. I believe these LLMs have already been commoditized.
Consider the primary use case for Anthropic: coding. Well, if you're using Claude Code or some variant, you can easily use OpenRouter to simply use whatever free tokens you can get. You may not even care what LLM you're using under the hood for a given task.
That's simply not a trillion dollar moat.
Can Anthropic jack up the prices? No. There are alternatives. There are open weight models that you can run on cloud platforms and increasingly you can run them locally. Local LLMs are going to be incredibly accessible in 3-5 years. Even now you can run Flash models on something you can buy from Apple. The inference is a lot slower compared to cloud usage but that'll change.
I see the Anthropic IPO as an effort to cash out before it all comes crashing down.
Consider the primary use case for Anthropic: coding. Well, if you're using Claude Code or some variant, you can easily use OpenRouter to simply use whatever free tokens you can get. You may not even care what LLM you're using under the hood for a given task.
That's simply not a trillion dollar moat.
Can Anthropic jack up the prices? No. There are alternatives. There are open weight models that you can run on cloud platforms and increasingly you can run them locally. Local LLMs are going to be incredibly accessible in 3-5 years. Even now you can run Flash models on something you can buy from Apple. The inference is a lot slower compared to cloud usage but that'll change.
I see the Anthropic IPO as an effort to cash out before it all comes crashing down.