Source: Thesignal
The three dominant AI labs are pursuing different strategies. OpenAI is amplifying capabilities and pricing power. Google is open-sourcing to commoditize routine tasks. Anthropic is signaling resource constraints. The result is a bifurcated market: closed proprietary models for high-stakes reasoning, open models for routine work. Enterprises must now choose between paying for OpenAI's latest capabilities, integrating Google's free infrastructure, or adopting Anthropic's constitutional safety approach—each designed to lock in different buyer cohorts. The actual pressure lands on the thousands of AI startups caught in the middle, where margins compress and defensibility collapses if you're not building something the incumbents haven't already commoditized.