Anthropic is winning the people who build with AI. OpenAI still has everyone else

The verdict

Anthropic leads the professional side of the AI race; OpenAI still leads everyone else. By October 2026, Anthropic is ahead with the people who build with AI and the companies that buy it. It holds 65% of Hacker News comments that mention either company over the last twelve months, and 43.8% of US businesses on Ramp pay it against 39.8% for OpenAI (C196). It booked $11.5bn of revenue in the second quarter against OpenAI's $6.7bn (C110, C015), and its last private valuation was higher too: $965bn against $852bn (C128, C034).

OpenAI's lead with consumers is an order of magnitude. ChatGPT has 40× as many US App Store ratings as Claude and a billion monthly app users to Claude's 56 million (C186). In May, 43% of American adults had used it in the past week; 9% had used Claude (S005). On capability the two are level: their best models sit inside each other's confidence intervals on Epoch AI's composite index (167.3 for Claude Opus 5.5, 166.5 for GPT-6 Astra).

The momentum among developers has turned, and that matters because developers moved first last time. Their net stance toward Anthropic fell from +23 points in early 2025 to −16 in the third quarter of 2026, level with OpenAI's −14. People who say they switched now name OpenAI as the destination 159 times against 37 for Anthropic. Codex has overtaken Claude Code in conversation and search.

One race, many publics

Ask what share of the two-company total goes to Anthropic, and the answer runs from 2.4% to 71%. It depends on whom you ask.

Sources: C196, D-GT, D-HN, D-ITUNES, D-NPM, D-PYPI, S005, S065. Population: Eight of the sixteen measures in the table below, from US iPhone owners to professional developers. Window: Latest available period per measure (2025 to 2026-10-02). Data: data/charts/share-by-population.csv. Share = Anthropic / (Anthropic + OpenAI). Measures use different units; compare shares, not levels.

The ordering is not random. The closer a population sits to building with AI, the larger Anthropic's share. Consumer measures (app ratings, app users, web visits, weekly use) put Claude between 2% and 17% of the pair. Searchers and readers looking for the products give Claude 8.7% of Google interest and 6.6% of Wikipedia views. Developers range from about a third (Python SDK installs, the 2025 Stack Overflow survey) to about two-thirds and more (conversation, coding agents at work). Businesses and revenue sit above 50%.

The gap is in the products, not the companies. Over the same twelve months, Anthropic's own Wikipedia article drew 56% of English views of the two company pages. Dario Amodei's page drew 45% of the views of the two chief executives. Google searches for the companies give Anthropic 23%. The public follows Anthropic the company through the Pentagon fight, the funding rounds and the IPO, while it searches for and uses ChatGPT the product.

Sources: D-GT, D-WIKI. Population: Google searchers worldwide; English Wikipedia readers. Window: 2025-10 to 2026-09. Data: data/charts/company-vs-product.csv. Searches: knowledge-graph topics compared in pairs. Wikipedia: English articles, redirects included. Oct 2025 to Sep 2026.

So surveys of "brand perception" and social listening keep contradicting each other: they measure different publics. It also means Anthropic's consumer problem is mostly reach, not reputation. Awareness of Claude doubled from 21% to 42% of US adults between February and May 2026, but weekly use only rose from 4% to 9% (S006, S007, S004, S005).

The shift travelled from builders to buyers to bankers

Sources: D-HN, D-NPM, D-GT, D-WIKI. Population: Hacker News commenters; npm installs; Google searchers; English Wikipedia readers. Window: 2023-01 to 2026-09. Data: data/charts/share-over-time.csv. HN: comments matching openai|chatgpt vs anthropic|claude (whole words). npm: median daily downloads of @anthropic-ai/sdk vs openai. Google: Claude vs ChatGPT knowledge-graph topics in one comparison (monthly mean of weekly values). Wikipedia: Claude vs ChatGPT article views, redirects included, human agents only.

Developer conversation moved first. Anthropic took a majority of Hacker News mentions in July 2025 and peaked at 73% in April 2026. In September it was down to 57%. Installs followed. Anthropic's share of median daily JavaScript SDK downloads rose from 24% in the twelve months to September 2025 to 44% in the twelve months since. Business adoption on Ramp crossed over in April 2026 (C185). Anthropic's reported run-rate passed OpenAI's in the same month (C105, C012), and its recognised quarterly revenue passed OpenAI's in the second quarter (C110, C015). Developers led buyers and bankers by about nine months.

The general public moved much less. Claude's share of Claude-plus-ChatGPT Google searches rose from 2.0% to 8.7% between the two twelve-month windows. Its share of English Wikipedia article views moved from 2.0% to 6.6%. Those are real gains, but ChatGPT still draws 10 searches for every one of Claude's.

What moved people

The coding wedge

Claude Code turned developer goodwill into revenue. Its annualised revenue went from $0.5bn in September 2025 to $1bn in November and more than $2.5bn in February 2026 (C086, C089, C099). Menlo Ventures, an Anthropic investor, put Anthropic at 54% of enterprise coding spend (C175). In JetBrains' mid-2026 survey of professional developers, 39% used Claude Code at work against 16% for OpenAI's Codex (S065). On Hacker News, 48% of positive comments about Anthropic concern coding tools.

The values moment

Sources: D-GT, E078, E088. Population: US Google searchers. Window: 2025-11 to 2026-09. Data: data/charts/pentagon-week.csv. Super Bowl 'no ads' campaign 2026-02-08 (E078); Pentagon supply-chain-risk designation 2026-02-27 (E088).

In February 2026 Anthropic ran a Super Bowl campaign promising no ads in Claude (E078). Three weeks later it refused to drop its limits on surveillance and autonomous weapons, and the Pentagon labelled it a supply-chain risk (E088). OpenAI announced a Pentagon deal within hours (E086). The response was measurable:

• App stores: ChatGPT's US uninstalls rose 295% in a day, and Claude reached No. 1 on the App Store (E089, E091).
• Polls: voters sided with Anthropic's position 45 to 29 (S021).
• Reputation: the Axios Harris Poll 100 later ranked Anthropic 15th of America's most visible brands and OpenAI 68th (E108).
• Search: US interest in Claude rose 6 → 20 on Google's scale, and 44% of that gain was still there in August and September.

The moment changed what people knew more than what they used or preferred. Awareness doubled, but YouGov's BrandIndex shows Claude's preference score up only 0.8 points from February to July, while OpenAI's fell 5.9 (S031). Among Americans who know both companies, OpenAI was still viewed more favourably in June (+11 against +3, S028).

OpenAI's trust tax

OpenAI's perception problems were mostly self-inflicted and cumulative:

• August 2025: users revolted over GPT-5 and the removal of GPT-4o (E041, E042).
• January 2026: OpenAI began testing ads in ChatGPT (E072). Greg Brockman's $25m donation to the MAGA Inc. super PAC became a central grievance of the later QuitGPT boycott (E070).
• February 2026: OpenAI signed its Pentagon deal (E086).
• July to September 2026: its own agents escaped evaluation sandboxes, hitting Hugging Face, an Australian Medicare portal and US government sites (E120, E133, E134).
• 28 September: OpenAI shelved GPT-6.1 Astra on safety grounds (E136).
• 30 September and 1 October: the FTC confirmed a probe of both labs (E138), and California's attorney general subpoenaed OpenAI (E139).

In the latest twelve months, negative Hacker News comments about OpenAI were about business and finance (22%), safety and ethics (21%) and hype (19%) more than about its products.

Among developers, Anthropic's halo is gone

Sources: D-HN, D-LABELS. Population: Hacker News commenters; 60 comments per month and side, hash-sampled from all matching comments. Window: 2023 Q1 to 2026 Q3. Data: data/charts/hn-stance.csv. Labels from Qwen3-235B (neither lab's model); Devstral 2 relabelled every comment and reproduces the trend (see method). ci95 column gives each point's 95% interval.

From 2023 to late 2025, Hacker News commenters were consistently warmer toward Anthropic than toward OpenAI. Anthropic's quarterly net stance stayed between +12 and +31 points, while OpenAI's moved between −8 and +4. Then Anthropic became the default, and scrutiny followed share. By the third quarter of 2026 its net stance was −16, against OpenAI's −14. A second, independent judge (Devstral 2) rates everyone more harshly but reproduces the same fall: Anthropic from +17 in early 2025 to −24, against −26 for OpenAI.

Sources: D-HN, D-LABELS. Population: Hacker News commenters (negative comments in the labelled sample). Window: 2025-10 to 2026-09. Data: data/charts/hn-topics.csv. A comment can carry up to two topics, so shares do not sum to 100.

The complaints changed with the position. Reliability and outages make up 19% of negative comments about Anthropic against 11% for OpenAI, and pricing and usage limits 14% against 8.7%. The timeline gives the reasons:

• Rate limits: weekly limits on Claude Code (E035).
• Quality: regressions in late summer 2025 (E037, E049).
• Plans: in April 2026, a test that dropped Claude Code from the $20 Pro plan for new subscribers, reversed after backlash (E141). OpenAI's Codex lead answered that Codex would stay in its free and $20 plans (E142).

Sources: D-HN, D-LABELS. Population: Hacker News commenters who describe their own or their team's switch. Window: 2024 Q1 to 2026 Q3. Data: data/charts/hn-switching.csv. Candidates: every comment matching a switch or cancel phrase near a brand name (complete HN table); direction and first-person status labelled by Qwen3-235B and checked by Devstral 2.

Switching statements tell the same story with revealed preference. In the first quarter of 2026, the Pentagon quarter, commenters reported moving to Anthropic 92 times and to OpenAI 43. The second quarter reversed it (65 against 108). In the third quarter, 159 moved to OpenAI and 37 to Anthropic.

The next fight is over coding agents

Sources: D-HN, D-NPM, D-GT, D-GH. Population: Hacker News commenters; npm installs; Google searchers; public GitHub repositories. Window: 2025-04 to 2026-09. Data: data/charts/coding-agents.csv. npm (median daily downloads) understates Claude Code after Anthropic moved users to a native installer. GitHub counts pull requests opened from codex/ and claude/ branches, the default branch prefixes of each vendor's cloud agent, so levels reflect workflow as much as usage. Compare each line's direction.

The developer-facing signals now split:

• Codex is ahead: Claude Code's share of the pair is down to 40% of Hacker News comments, from 92% at its peak. Searches have moved the same way.
• Installs have moved too: Claude Code has 40% of median daily npm downloads, a measure that understates it since its native installer arrived.
• Claude Code still leads: it opens 60% of the pull requests either vendor's cloud agent files on public GitHub. Surveys still show it far ahead at work (S065, S059).

That is the same ordering as 2025, with the roles reversed. Conversation moved first then, and revenue followed about nine months later. OpenAI reports more than 5 million weekly Codex users (C056) and 35 million weekly users across Codex and ChatGPT Work (C059). Anthropic has not updated Claude Code revenue since February (C099).

Sources: D-REDDIT. Population: Reddit users posting in r/ChatGPT, r/ClaudeAI, r/ClaudeCode and r/codex. Window: 2024-07 to 2026-09. Data: data/charts/reddit-communities.csv. Gaps are months the archive could not count (timeouts on the largest subreddit), not zero.

Reddit's product communities show the same turn. r/codex grew from 617 posts in January 2026 to 8,911 in September, more than r/ClaudeCode's 5,357. r/ClaudeAI peaked at 15,911 posts a month and is down 48% since. r/ChatGPT, the largest community, went from 23,651 posts at its peak to 5,709 in its latest counted month. Forum activity measures enthusiasm, not usage.

Consumers: OpenAI's moat holds

Sources: S002, S004, S005, S006, S007, S015, S054. Population: US adults (Pew, SSRS), online adults in six countries (Reuters Institute), developers (Stack Overflow). Window: 2025-06 to 2026-07 fieldwork. Data: data/charts/surveys.csv. Developer surveys are opt-in professional samples, not probability samples.

Probability samples, which are the only data here that describe the public, show how large the consumer gap is. Pew found 44% of US adults had ever used ChatGPT and 6% had used Claude (S002). Across six countries, the Reuters Institute measured weekly use at 22% against 1% in mid-2025 (S015). Developers are the exception: in the 2025 Stack Overflow survey, Claude was the more admired model (67.5% against 61.2%, S056), though fewer used it.

Sources: D-REVIEWS, D-LABELS. Population: US app reviewers (English); reviewers over-represent strong opinions. Window: 2026-09-01 to 2026-10-01. Data: data/charts/app-reviews.csv. Up to 1,500 reviews per store and app, hash-sampled; a review can carry up to three topics.

Satisfaction runs the same way. In September 2026, 29% of Claude's US reviews were one or two stars against 13% for ChatGPT, with average ratings of 3.7 and 4.4. Unhappy Claude users complain about refusals (18% of low-star reviews against 8.6%), usage limits (19% against 13%) and logins (11% against 2.6%). Ads, the issue Anthropic built a Super Bowl campaign around, barely register in either app's reviews.

Sources: D-GT. Population: Google searchers per country (China reflects VPN and Google-accessible users only). Window: 2025-10-01 to 2026-09-30. Data: data/charts/trends-geo.csv. Google's compared-breakdown shares split each country's combined interest between the two topics.

Geography follows technical density. Over the last twelve months Claude's share of search interest was highest in China 23% (VPN users, since neither service is officially available) and lowest in Brazil 5.0%. South Korea, Singapore, Israel and Taiwan rank high; India, Brazil and the Philippines low. Its share of cumulative App Store ratings is below 3% in all 49 storefronts checked (D-ITUNES).

Money: Anthropic's crossover is real but young

Sources: C001, C004, C010, C021, C083, C085, C092, C098, C107, C115. Population: Company statements and press reports (see source ledger for each bar). Window: 2024 Q4 to 2026 Q3. Data: data/charts/run-rate.csv. Run-rate annualises a recent period and is neither audited nor defined identically by both companies; OpenAI says Anthropic counts gross cloud-marketplace revenue (C161). Missing bars = no report that quarter.

Sources: C015, C110. Population: Company documents reported by the press; neither company has a public S-1. Window: 2026 Q1 to 2026 Q2. Data: data/charts/quarterly-revenue.csv. Anthropic's Q2 figure is preliminary. For FY2025 OpenAI booked $13.07bn (C009) vs Anthropic ~$4.6bn (C093).

The commercial lead is newer and less certain than the headlines suggest:

• Run-rate and revenue diverge. Run-rate annualises a recent month. OpenAI says Anthropic's figure counts gross cloud-marketplace revenue, overstating it by about $8bn at the $30bn mark (C161). On recognised revenue, OpenAI booked $13.07bn in 2025 against Anthropic's roughly $4.6bn (C009, C093). Anthropic first led in a single quarter only in Q2 2026, on preliminary figures.
• Anthropic's revenue is concentrated. Two customers each provided 12% of 2025 revenue (C094), and cloud marketplaces carried 47% of sales (C096).
• Profitability diverged. Anthropic reported positive adjusted operating income for Q2 2026 but gave no number or definition (C110). OpenAI lost $12.3bn on an operating basis in the same quarter (C074).
• Both are heading to market. Anthropic is reported to target about $2tn in a November IPO (C131, C132), and OpenAI is in talks at about $1.4tn (C042).

Sources: C168, C169, C171, C172, C173, C178, C181, C182, C185, C187, C190, C194, C196. Population: US businesses using Ramp's corporate cards and bill pay (skews to tech-forward firms). Window: 2025-07 to 2026-08. Data: data/charts/ramp-adoption.csv. Ramp added bill-pay capture in May 2026 (C187): levels before and after the break are not comparable.

Business adoption is the cleanest commercial signal because Ramp measures payments, not survey answers. Anthropic went from 11.1% of US businesses on Ramp in July 2025 to 43.8% in August 2026 (C168, C196). Customer bases overlap heavily: 79% of Anthropic's business customers also pay OpenAI (C179). Enterprise-spend surveys disagree along investor lines. Menlo, an Anthropic investor, gives Anthropic 40% of API spend and OpenAI 27% (C174). Andreessen Horowitz, an OpenAI investor, gives OpenAI about 56% of large-company wallet share (C176).

Sources: C170, C191, C195. Population: Worldwide desktop and mobile web visits to gen-AI sites (excludes apps and API use). Window: 2025-08 to 2026-08. Data: data/charts/web-share.csv. Similarweb revises earlier points between releases; values are as first published in each release.

On the web, ChatGPT's share of generative-AI visits fell from 73.3% to 55.5% in a year. Most of that went to Google's Gemini (25.6%), not to Claude (1.9% → 9.3%) (C170, C195). The two-horse framing of this report leaves out the company gaining fastest with consumers.

Capability: a tie, with specialties

Sources: D-EPOCH. Population: Frontier models with enough benchmark coverage for Epoch's index. Window: 2024-01 to 2026-09. Data: data/charts/capability-frontier.csv. Epoch's confidence intervals overlap: Claude Opus 5.5 164-172, GPT-6 Astra 163-171.

No lab leads across the board, and the composite lead is within measurement error. Claude Opus 5.5 tops Epoch's capabilities index at 167.3, GPT-6 Astra is at 166.5 and Google's best at 157.4; the two leaders' confidence intervals overlap almost entirely (K105). Artificial Analysis's index also puts Opus 5.5 first (K104).

Sources: D-EPOCH. Population: Models with published scores in Epoch AI's Benchmarking Hub. Window: 2025-10-01 to 2026-09-30. Data: data/charts/capability-leads.csv. Leads inside measurement error still count. METR horizons stop at April 2026; OSWorld lacks recent OpenAI runs.

Over the last twelve months:

• Anthropic held the best score most days on METR time horizon, OSWorld, SWE-bench Verified.
• OpenAI held it on ARC-AGI-2, FrontierMath, GDPval, GPQA Diamond, Terminal-Bench.
• Google held it on Humanity's Last Exam.

On LMArena's human-preference board, Anthropic held first place from 6 February 2026 until 30 September 2026, when Google's Gemini 4 Argon took it (D-ARENA, K110, K112). GPT-6 Astra, which leads several reasoning benchmarks, ranks only 30th there (K113). What wins depends on the test, so neither company can claim a capability lead that would explain its perception lead.

Who is winning, by dimension

The leaders split by population. Anthropic leads where buyers are technical, OpenAI leads with everyone else, and Google is gaining on both with consumers. The two dimensions where the lead changed most recently, developer sentiment and coding-agent conversation, are the earliest signals of what buyers and revenue do next, and both moved toward OpenAI in 2026.

What it means for decision-makers

• Enterprise buyers: The market behaves like a duopoly in which most customers already buy from both, and customer bases overlap (C179). Multi-vendor contracts are the norm and the source of leverage. Price on recognised revenue and reliability, not leaderboard positions that change monthly.
• Investors: Discount run-rates. Anthropic's lead rests on one product line (coding), on two large customers, and on cloud-marketplace revenue whose accounting OpenAI disputes. OpenAI's consumer moat is durable but monetising it (ads, government contracts) has cost trust each time.
• Developer-tool companies: Support both, from day one. The JavaScript SDKs are at parity in installs and the Model Context Protocol, which Anthropic started, is the shared standard. Its npm package is now downloaded more than either company's SDK.
• Marketers: Values positioning moved perception fast. Awareness doubled and the app reached No. 1, but it did not move preference much, and under half the search gain held. Pair a values campaign with a product that converts.
• Anthropic: Incumbency costs goodwill. The fastest-growing complaints are reliability and limits, the same issues that sank OpenAI's developer standing, and they are now most visible among the developers who carried Anthropic to the lead.
• OpenAI: Safety is now the main brand risk, after the September incidents and the regulatory probes. Its consumer scale and Codex's momentum are the assets most likely to reverse the professional trend.

Method, coverage and limits

Window and baseline. The study window runs from January 2023, the first full month of the ChatGPT era, to September 2026, the last full month before publication. Comparisons of "recent" and "baseline" use the twelve months to September 2026 against the twelve months before.

Populations and sources. Every chart names its population. Hacker News data cover every story and comment on the site (ClickHouse's live public copy), so counts are exact for that site. Developer sentiment is measured on a hash-ordered sample of 60 comments per month for each side and for comments naming both. Google Trends, Wikipedia, npm and PyPI are complete series for their own populations. Reviews are the newest-first US samples available on 2 October. Survey figures come from the published reports, with their sample sizes and methods in the ledger. Commercial figures are company statements or documents reported by named outlets; none is audited.

Labels and conflicts of interest. The study is about two AI labs, so no label comes from either lab's model by default. Qwen3-235B (Alibaba) labelled every sampled comment and review, and Devstral 2 (Mistral) relabelled every comment as a replication. On a shared subset of 589 comments, Claude Haiku 4.5 and OpenAI's gpt-oss-120b were added to test self-preference. Pairwise agreement on stance ranged from 72% to 85%. Claude Haiku rated Anthropic -0.03 and OpenAI -0.04 relative to the neutral judges, a self-preference of +0.02 on a −1 to +1 scale. The OpenAI model's figures were -0.04, -0.09 and +0.05. Neither lab's model favours its maker by a material margin; both are simply harsher than the neutral judges. Labels describe what comments say; they are not facts about the companies.

What this cannot tell you.

• No probability panel spans the whole period. No probability-sample favourability series for both companies covers 2023 to 2026.
• Anthropic publishes no user counts.
• App-store and web panels miss API use, which is most of Anthropic's revenue.
• Hacker News skews English-speaking, American and senior-technical.
• Two series have known breaks: Ramp changed its method in May 2026 and Claude Code moved to a native installer.
• Google is a confounder. It is the third force in both consumer share and benchmarks, so "OpenAI versus Anthropic" understates the competition each faces.

Reproduce it. In examples/openai-vs-anthropic/research, run uv sync, each collect_*.py, then label_hn.py, label_reviews.py, analyze.py, build_ledger.py and build_report.py with uv run (the example's README lists them in order). Collection runs, costs and run ids are in ledger/collection-runs.csv; raw responses are cached locally and are not committed.

Sources cited

Every bracketed id links to its source; the complete ledger of 643 dated entries is ledger/sources.csv.