At the HumanX conference, everyone was talking about Claude

At the HumanX AI conference in San Francisco this week, thousands of techies descended on the city’s Moscone Center, where discussions focused on how AI is changing business. Agents, who use business and coding, are starting to be deployed in many industries – especially through businesses and consumer affairs.

Naturally, I wanted to know which chatbot was the most popular, and I often heard one name: Claude.

Anthropic got a shout out at many of the sessions held throughout the week, and was a topic of conversation with the vendors I spoke to and read in the conference room. Chatbot I didn’t hear much? ChatGPT. One of the vendors I spoke to told me that he and his team used Claude a lot, when he heard that ChatGPT and OpenAI went down – or, as the Internet likes to say, “crashed.”

Recently, this does not seem to be the case. Indeed, it is not known what will cure those feelings, even in the near future $122 billion around it’s his The upcoming IPOOpenAI has lost its footing—or, at least, it doesn’t seem to know what the next step is.

One of the problems may be the perception that the company is not interested. Last month, OpenAI abandoned several long-term projects (including its AI Sora video generator it is a difficult system to initiate the “adult” version of ChatGPT), locking in place for business-focused and writing services. Currently, several events, including a recent New Yorker piece which questioned whether the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, was trustworthy or not, has led to the amount of negative buzz around the company. The company’s work with the Trump administration did not win any friends, nor did its decision to insert ads into ChatGPT.

During one HumanX interview, Sierra founder and CEO Bret Taylor (who is also chairman of the OpenAI board) defended Altman when asked by Alex Heath about the New Yorker’s profile. “I think Sam is one of the most visible leaders and leaders in the world,” Taylor said. “If you want to look for people who oppose him, you will find them, and they will talk a lot,” he said, and added: “I think Sam is amazing.”

Controversy and flexibility can make OpenAI seem passive rather than intelligent, as if it is simply responding to events rather than creating them. That said, when it comes to fame and money, OpenAI and Anthropic are neck and neck – or at least, that’s what it looks like, with some indications that it is. Anthropic is available among business users. The Wall Street Journal recently analyzed their earnings, indicating that the two companies were “the fastest growing businesses in the history of technology.” As such, perhaps the “fall” of OpenAI simply means that it is no longer successful. It has competition – which, in most industries, is normal.

If anything, it’s clear that OpenAI is determined to do what it takes to remain dominant. This week, the company announced new $100 subscription fee for ChatGPT and more access to Codex, his writing tool. The move appears to be designed to encourage wider use of the tool while hopefully weaning users away from Claude Code.

In a HumanX interview with Bloomberg reporter Rachel Metz, OpenAI CTO of B2B services Srinivas Narayanan noted how rapidly the technology has evolved.

“We live in an amazing time in technology, where every month, and sometimes every day, we’re all waiting for something new,” Narayanan said. Referring to coding as an example, he added, “We knew that AI would affect software engineering, people have been using coding for the past year, but even in the last few months, the whole field has changed.”

Customer engagement may be the focus of the technology right now, as some AI applications (for example, artificial intelligence) have yet to catch on. However, the amount of work that companies have begun to offload to their small hardware assistants is staggering — and, as Narayanan noted in his speech, it’s all happened in a short period of time. In such an uncertain environment, the future is open.