To go vertical they’d need to illustrate the value-add, a problem that the vertical competitors already have. Why use Claude for Accountants at $300/month when regular Claude will do the same thing for much less? The stock answer is that Claude for Accountants keeps your data more secure and doesn’t train on it. But a) I think the enterprise consumer is much less likely to trust a model creator not to stick its hand in the cookie jar than a middleman who needs the trust to survive, and b) the vertical competitors typically don’t use the absolute most up-to-date models in their products anyway, so why not just go open-source and run everything in-house? 6 months is a long time in tech, but it’s the blink of an eye in most white-collar professions.

Once the majority of work at a company can be done by AI, Anthropic has an alternative revenue stream to selling AIs to that company--directly competing with that company with a completely integrated AI system. There's of course many barriers to entry/various advantages of incumbents--but it's possible to see a world in which the company selling the AI has a huge advantage too.