We have like a dozen different LLM tools available to us and it's as easy as clicking on a dropdown to switch in every single one of them, and we have several thousand employees. Self-hosting with the cheaper OSS models is also becoming more and more attractive for larger orgs.

Switching LLM providers as a company is not, once all your employees have it integrated with GitHub, their IDE, etc.

Speaking as someone who has been at professionally this since the 1980s, I suggest that while sometimes switching costs and network effects happen "organically," in this century businesses devote enormous amounts of attention to artificially building switching costs.

It's such a dirty practice that we have a four-letter word for it, a "moat." But of course, the moat isn't really to keep competitors out of a market, it's actually to keep customers trapped within it.

I fully expect every one of these AI providers to put as much work into trying to trap their customers within their ecosystem that they do to improve their capabilities.

> Switching LLM providers as a company is not, once all your employees have it integrated with GitHub, their IDE, etc.

I'm not so sure about this. I guess it depends on how well people did their job there.

Ideally, whatever people built is loosely coupled to that third-party resource, meaning that switching cost will stay low.

After all, it's probably just prompts + an API layer. Unless one micro-optimizes their prompts for claude (which then breaks once a new checkpoint drops, hence is a bad idea regardless), pointing them towards a different API endpoint should be doable.

Totally agree with your Google thesis. I would never count them out. I say that as someone that uses Claude (and a little chatgpt), but not Google's AI at the moment.

Working for a 10k+ corporate and we made it pretty easy to switch to any provider, people here can use Anthropic's, OpenAI's, and our own self-hosted open weight models very easily. It's one drop-down or `/` command away to switch between them.

I think other companies are probably doing the same, the moat of a AWS/GCP/Azure is much deeper with how contrived it is to migrate between them even if you abstract as much as possible with something like Kubernetes.

It's trivial to switch. The company I work for has 1k employees has already switched like 3 times in the last two years.

I think you'd be surprised. I've seen orgs entirely switch fundamental tech choices to save 10%.

Once they realise that you can use Deepseek / GLM for 10% of the cost these labs are done.

My F500 company switched ~10k employees of Claude to copilot in 30 days. Google did similar between Jetstream and Claude. The moat just isn’t there right now

With some gateway inbetween managing the model responses, MCP and skills (see https://modelcontextprotocol.io/seps/2640-skills-extension) this becomes very easy

VS code or other ides with multiple providers makes it pretty easy.

Also for larger companies like Amazon the danger is they replace Anthropic completely with self-hosted models.

Depending on how the company leverages them, it's super easy.

For us it's as easy as clicking a dropdown. The copilot vs code extension allows for this ez pz, the same is true for companies that implement an AI gateway for other tooling.

Integrations with Github and IDE are nothing. It's like changing your email software.

Switching LLM providers as a company is even easier than a solo developer, most large companies I know are using AWS Bedrock and selecting another model is basically just a checkbox for them

What?

Have you used Copilot at a company?

I can literally change my model in 3 seconds.

The moat is as shallow as it gets. Investing in a single LLM provider at the moment would be a mistake.

A gateway like GoModel can make switching transparent, along with the many other benefits you get with a gateway.

It’s literally a menu in Copilot.

The model is just some REST endpoint you switch out even in a lot of enterprise setups.

Based on how shoddy their customer facing applications are, I wouldn't trust any of these AI companies for an OS. It's like Google II - can't trust them to support a product longer than it took to develop it.

The biggest moat with applications like MS Office is compatibility. Sharing a slide deck or spreadsheet with others is a simple decision, you know they have it or have software that can read/write it.

I don't get the need to have Anthropic build their custom versions of MS Office apps, I can tell Claude to generate a word doc from a wiki page and it does a pretty damn good job. Anthropic's statistical median level of software that they had Claude create isn't going to replace Office apps to the point where companies cancel/stop renewing their MS Office subscriptions/licenses.

The other element is trust. Do end users trust their data in Anthropic's systems? A lot of people get creeped out when they search for content from one device in their household and then nearly instantaneously they start seeing ads from other devices on the same topic. How creepy will AI get if it starts consuming all your docs, spreadsheets, personal finance info, emails, etc.?

End-user software is going to be under a lot of pressure. If you're Microsoft, Apple, or Google: you can easily copy products or integrate ideas into their platform. I see companies like Adobe, Salesforce, and Oracle having to downsize significantly to stay profitable. Having said that, my in-laws still pay for an AOL email so I don't think their cashflow is going to zero soon.

now imagine that said customer/competitors have been uploading/generating their source code, problem reports, marketing collateral, and other IP _to the LLM company_ for the last few years.

This is equally true for how risky it is to build such a business on top of a 3rd party black box. Model nerfing is widely speculated and the only true way to guarantee that the models you're using are stable and consistent is to run your own hardware. Not to mention the recent Navier-Stokes controversy.

The moment you find a money-making formula on top of someone else's black box model, there's nothing stopping them from taking it for themselves.

If Google and Microsoft have gone dormant in this space, I have to think it’s because they haven’t been seeing any ROI, either. Possibly because customers have been so underwhelmed.

I’ve been using Office Copilot more or less since it was released, and the general opinion around the office is that it’s a huge waste of time. The auto-transcripts produce 3 pages of fluff when previously someone would send 3 sentences’ worth of what actually mattered. The auto-drafted documents rarely add anything meaningful beyond what was already in the prompt. The question answering and research tools are only as good as Sharepoint/Confluence/Jira/etc’s pre-existing search feature, and therefore untrustworthy, etc.

What made Anthropic exciting was they had locked onto a use case that reliably generates positive value: coding. Not much else has proven, from a business perspective, to be anything more than an exceptionally buzzworthy money pit.

Helping my wife this past week try and setup an automation in her workspace account revealed how dormant google is here.

Gemini is unable to take an attachment from gmail, read it, then place it in the correct drive folder and update a spreadsheet with what it found in the attachment.

For whatever reason, Google decided to firewall "Gmail Gemini" from "Drive Gemini". Gmail Gemini can send files to drive, but not edit anything, and Drive Gmail can edit files, but cannot be initiated from gmail.

Meanwhile claude code with Google extensions can do this no problem.

Google, wtf are you doing?

Yes, that's the direction I've been witnessing for Claude too. But it's a short to middle-term strategy IMO, by the time companies are ready to drop all these apps they will need something else entirely, not Claude's slides or spreadsheets or Salesforce.

The fact that Frontier AI can become Google Workspace at a flip of a switch is what is crazy valuable. Anthropic and OpenAI can enter and disrupt any market, especially software, faster than any company ever could, because users want the flow to start and end in their chat interfaces.

> Meanwhile, Google and Microsoft, which already dominate that area, seem to be dormant.

Google owns 15% of Anthropic I think.

And Google offers Argon 4 to paying Workspace and Google One customers now. How's what was the number 1 model on nearly every single bench a few weeks ago being "dormant"?

I know people all in in the Google ecosystem (getting credits from Android phones they buy etc.) who only swear by the Google models and who are now using Argon 4: I asked them and a few days ago they had access (but they were already using other Google models before that).

Doesn't GMail have billions account by now?

I'd tend to say with billions of users on GMail and a model like Argon and 15% of the Anthropic shares, Google is not where you think it is.

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> Claude is the de-facto SWE model now, yes you could use an open model but you would always be wondering if Claude would do better,

In my testing (incredibly similar workflows, moving around between claude code and cursor), I haven't found that much difference between Sonnet and GLM-5.3/flash.

Sonnet seems lazier, but has better prompt adherence, and is constantly telling me it can't do things, while GLM will just Find A Way to do whatever I've asked for.

I really appreciate being able to see GLM's thinking tokens, as I can head it off quicker. Claude's a little harder to steer, but the integration in Claude code makes it much easier to leave it running on things overnight, which is hard to get working properly in Cursor.

Overall, I'm not sure Anthropic have that much of a moat, in coding particularly. This seems weird to me, as they have so much more usage data that's hard to replicate.

> like using Duck Duck or some other Search engine

The difference between Anthropic's models and alternatives is not as big as Google Search vs other search engines

SaaS have vendor lock-in, they have your data hostage and whar importantly your habits: other software never gonna be 100% the same.

Changing LLM backend on other hand takes 2 seconds.

And it's not all or nothing: you can just keep anthropic $20 plan for planning and do 99% code generation with chinese model.

That "someone else" is just shifting from a single open source maintainer to an LLM.

I'm fascinated by exactly how an investment in the company that first reaches AGI (or whatever we decide to call it) might pay off... It feels like the stocks would absolutely be worth owning in the immediate term because they'd be hot property at the point where people realise it's happening.

The thing that I'm less clear on is, if and when they achieve some kind of recursive improvement exponential growth thingy, isn't that going to heavily disrupt the entire economy / stock market? In that environment, would Anthropic's stocks really be a good bet, given they have to operate within the economy?

> It feels like people are still trying to bet on the horse that will achieve gAI.

I think that at this point gAI is just a marketing blurb, and the actual race is to dominate current practical applications involving basic RAG and ReAct loops. This can go from anything between software development, business intelligence, and market research. A company whose top brass can use a team of agents to do what nowadays they assign to mid- and top-level management is an executive with tighter control over the whole business process. For this you don't need gAI.

I've noticed they've actually stopped harping on about this AGI nonsense, I suppose because no one was buying it to begin with and they themselves didn't really have any idea wtf they were talking about when talking about "AGI". Now it's all about a bajillion agents running autonomously or whatever

the answer is to use a gateway that all the prompts go through. There are many proprietary and open source solutions for this. You get the benefit of making it trivial to switch between proprietary providers in case you are unhappy with the performance or squeezed on price. The AI Gateways put cap on LLM providers' margin upside.

Additionally, the gateway allows for caching, additional security checks, centralized monitoring. I think most corporations have a multi-provider setup anyway.

Anthropic has basically no support.

What do you mean? We use Bedrock at our company and I can switch to literally any model, including the open ones, by just typing /model and picking it, even including inside Claude Code. It's ridiculously easy to switch, and imho GLM 5.3 is good enough for 99% of my daily tasks already.

You pay a service provider, who manages the open models… there is absolutely nothing special about it. The hardware can be something you own. Or you rent. Or you just pay the service provider to access the open model apis. Lots of options here, it’s not different from pretty much any other software service in the corporate world

Isn't that exactly how Linux companies are making money?

Good luck in calling Anthropic support...