On April 28, Anthropic crossed a $1 trillion valuation and officially became the most valuable AI company on Earth.
The same Tuesday, OpenAI:
- Missed its own revenue projections (per WSJ; Oracle and chip stocks fell)
- Watched Elon Musk’s lawyer tell a federal jury Sam Altman “stole a charity”
- Pivoted onto AWS Bedrock, one day after dropping Microsoft exclusivity
- Got a piece in The Atlantic literally titled “Anthropic’s Little Brother.”
Just normal Tuesday stuff.
Here’s what else happened
While OpenAI was getting sued, Anthropic launched Claude for Creative Work with native connectors for Blender, Adobe Creative Cloud, Autodesk Fusion, Ableton, Splice, SketchUp, Resolume, and Canva. Claude can now debug a 3D scene, batch-edit Photoshop assets, or pull stems out of Splice for you.
Adobe simultaneously shipped its own Adobe for creativity Claude connector, giving Claude live access to 50+ pro tools across Photoshop, Premiere, Firefly, and InDesign. Anthropic also joined the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron.
In one day, Anthropic became the AI you’d actually plug into the apps you already pay for.
Why this matters
The race to “smartest model” is over. Both labs are locked in a feature-parity loop where Claude and GPT-5.5 trade benchmark wins every six weeks. The new race is “deepest workflow,” and whichever lab gets buried inside the tools you already use wins.
The chat interface is saturated; workflow depth is the moat. And the deepest workflow integration possible is the computer itself. Once small models get good enough (and they will, in the next 18 months if not sooner), whoever’s agent runs natively on your Mac, your iPhone, or the next device paradigm (glasses?) will control the surface where every other piece of software lives.
Our take
This is why I now believe OpenAI & Anthropic will have to become Microsoft and Apple. Cloud tokens are an insanely expensive business right now. An Nvidia exec said yesterday the cost of AI compute has now passed the cost of employees at most companies. Neither lab can subsidize that forever.
The natural endgame? The one Apple and Microsoft have already settled into. Sell the hardware. OpenAI is reportedly building a phone. Anthropic’s creative tool plays are workflow-deep but compute-light, the kind of thing that makes way more sense if Claude eventually lives on your Mac, not a data center. For this reason, we think Anthropic should eventually make computers too.
Today’s $1 trillion flip is the lagging indicator. The leading indicator? Who’s best set up to sell you the device your local agent will run on.
Editor’s note: This content originally ran in the newsletter of our sister publication, The Neuron. To read more from The Neuron, sign up for its newsletter here.