This is the weirdest technology market that I’ve seen. Researchers are getting rewarded with VC money to try what remains a science experiment. That used to be a bad word and now that gets rewarded with billions of dollars in valuation.
It gets lost on people in techcentric fields because Claude's at the forefront of things we care about, but Anthropic is basically unknown among the wider populace.
Last I'd looked a few months ago, Anthropic's brand awareness was in the middle single digits; OpenAI/ChatGPT was somewhere around 80% for comparison. MS/Copilot and Gemini were somewhere between the two but closer to Open AI than Anthropic.
tl;dr - Anthropic has a lot more to gain from awareness campaigns than the other major model providers do.
However, I speak with a small subset of our most experienced engineers and they all love Claude Sonnet 4.5. Who knows if this lead will last.
I don't see what the basis for this is that wouldn't be equally true for OpenAI.
Anthropic's edge is that they very arguably have some of the best technology available right now, despite operating at a fraction of the scale of their direct competitors. They have to start building mind and marketshare if they're going to hold that position, though, which is the point of advertising.
This is the reason they haven't bothered to provide an image generator yet - because Chat users are not their focus.
Of course OpenAI has tons of money and can branch off in all kind of directions (image, video, n8n clone, now RAG as a service).
In the end I think they will all be good enough and both Anthropic and OpenAI lead will evaporate.
Google will be left to win because they already have all the customers with the GSuite and OpenAI will be incorporated at massive loss in Microsoft, which is already selling to all the Azure customers.