It's both insane and not unreasonable. If Anthropic's internal version of Claude Code gets so good that they can recreate all of google's products quickly there's no moat anymore.

If AI is winner take all, then the value is effectively infinite. Obviously insane, but maybe it's winner take most?

It's the techno-hubristic version of Pascal's wager. The reward for the existence of God is infinite, so it worth investing all the money in the world to create one.

> " If Anthropic's internal version of Claude Code gets so good that they can recreate all of google's products quickly"

I know you aren't asserting this but rather just putting the argument out there, but to me at least it's interesting comparing a company that has vendor lock-in and monopoly or duopoly status in various markets vs one that doesn't.

I'd argue that Google's products themselves haven't been their moat for decades -- their moat is "default search engine status" in the tiny number of Browsers That Matter (Arguably just Chrome and Mobile Safari), being entrenched as the main display ad network, duopoly status as an OS vendor (Android), and monopoly status on OS vendor for low-end education laptops (ChromeOS). If somehow those were all suddenly eliminated, I think Google would be orders of magnitude less valuable.

Is there no moat for previous account and user buy-in?

Convincing billions of users to make a new account and do all their e-mail on a new domain? A new YouTube channel with all new subscribers? Migrate all their google drive and AdSense accounts to another company, etc?

This is trivially simple and creates no moat?