The HumanX conference in San Francisco just handed us the clearest signal yet — the AI race has a new frontrunner, and its name is Claude.
The Room Was Buzzing — And It Wasn’t About ChatGPT
Picture this. Thousands of tech founders, venture capitalists, and AI enthusiasts pack into San Francisco’s Moscone Center for HumanX 2026, one of the biggest AI conferences of the year. The energy is electric. The conversations are loud. And one name keeps coming up — over and over again.
That name? Claude.
Not ChatGPT. Not Gemini. Claude.
TechCrunch’s Lucas Ropek walked the conference floor and asked around. The answer was consistent. Vendors, founders, and investors all pointed to Anthropic’s Claude as their go-to AI tool. One vendor even made a point of saying his team uses Claude heavily — and that ChatGPT had, in his words, “fell off.”
That’s a bold statement. But it wasn’t a lonely one.
From Vegas Underdog to San Francisco Superstar
Here’s what makes this shift so wild. Just one year ago, HumanX was held in Las Vegas. Back then, OpenAI was the clear crowd favourite. VCs were placing their chips on Sam Altman’s company like it was a sure bet at the blackjack table.
Fast forward twelve months. Same conference, different city, completely different energy.
“In Vegas last year, it felt like OpenAI was the clear winner, and now it seems like Anthropic is miles ahead,” said Roseanne Winsek of Renegade Partners, speaking to Business Insider. “The Anthropic product is so good.”
That’s not just one person’s hot take. CNBC spoke with 19 executives and investors at HumanX. The consensus? Anthropic is cooking. And the consensus on OpenAI? Well… let’s just say the vibes weren’t great.
The shift is real. It’s loud. And it happened fast.
Claude Mania Is a Whole Thing Now
So what exactly is driving all this Anthropic love? Two words: Claude Code.
Anthropic’s viral coding agent launched to the general public in May 2025. By February 2026, it was already generating more than $2.5 billion in annualized revenue. That’s not a slow burn — that’s a rocket ship.
Arvind Jain, CEO of enterprise AI company Glean, gave it a name that stuck. He called it “Claude Mania.”
“It has become a religion, that’s the level of that mania,” Jain said. “Everybody, if you go and ask them today, ‘Hey, if I gave you one AI tool, what tool would you want?’ The answer would be Claude.”
A religion. That’s a strong word. But when you look at the numbers, it starts to make sense. Anthropic announced its run-rate revenue surpassed $30 billion — up from just $9 billion at the end of 2025. That’s a tripling of revenue in roughly three months. Andy Chen, a former partner at Coatue and Kleiner Perkins, confirmed it bluntly: “Anthropic has tripled its revenue in the past three months.”
That kind of growth doesn’t happen by accident.
Focus Wins. Every Time.
Here’s the thing about Anthropic that keeps coming up in every conversation at HumanX. They stayed focused. While OpenAI was juggling a dozen different products — video generators, voice models, “sexy” chatbot experiments — Anthropic kept its head down.
Victor Riparbelli, CEO of AI video company Synthesia, put it perfectly in his CNBC interview: “The guys at Anthropic were just like, ‘We’re not going to do anything about video, we’re not going to care about voice models, we’re just going to solve code gen,’ and now we’re here.”
He added: “OpenAI has had the problem of having to market six different products, which just takes up mind space for the consumer.”
Jared Quincy Davis, founder and CEO of Mithril, an AI cloud platform, agreed. He praised Anthropic’s deliberate decisions — focusing on enterprise, frontier capabilities, and coding — as “great decisions.” The strategy paid off. Big time.
Restraint is rare in Silicon Valley. Anthropic made it look like a superpower.
The Mythos Drop That Broke the Internet (Almost)
If Claude Code was the opening act, Mythos was the headline show.
Midway through HumanX, Anthropic dropped a bombshell. They announced Claude Mythos Preview — a new AI model with advanced cybersecurity capabilities, powered by elite coding and reasoning skills. The catch? It’s so powerful that Anthropic isn’t releasing it to the general public yet. The risk of cyberattacks is too high.
Let that sink in. A model too dangerous to release. That’s either terrifying or incredibly cool, depending on your perspective.
The buzz was immediate. Tomasz Tunguz, founder and general partner of Theory Ventures, didn’t hold back: “The Mythos model is a huge deal. There’s a tremendous amount of excitement.”
Only about 50 companies got early access. Everyone else at HumanX was left talking about it from the outside — which, honestly, might have made the hype even bigger.
OpenAI’s Rough Patch — What’s Going On?
Let’s be fair. OpenAI isn’t going anywhere. The company just closed a $122 billion funding round and has an IPO on the horizon. The Wall Street Journal called both OpenAI and Anthropic “the fastest-growing businesses in the history of tech.” That’s not nothing.
But perception matters. And right now, OpenAI’s perception has taken some hits.
The company shut down its AI video generator Sora. It abandoned a plan to launch a “sexy” version of ChatGPT. It acquired an internet talk show called TBPN, which left many in the industry scratching their heads. A New Yorker profile questioned whether CEO Sam Altman could be trusted. And its work with the Trump administration and decision to add advertising to ChatGPT haven’t exactly won fans.
The moves feel reactive. Not strategic. Like a company responding to events rather than shaping them.
OpenAI CTO of B2B applications Srinivas Narayanan acknowledged the pace of change at HumanX: “We are in this incredible moment in technology, where every month, and sometimes every day, we are all looking forward to something new.” That’s true. But right now, a lot of that “something new” is coming from Anthropic.
OpenAI did fire back with a new $100/month ChatGPT Pro subscription with expanded access to Codex, its coding tool. The move is clearly aimed at pulling users away from Claude Code. The battle is on.
The Bigger Picture: AI Is Changing Work Right Now
Beyond the brand wars, HumanX surfaced something more important. AI isn’t just a future thing anymore. It’s changing how companies operate today.
Ashwin Sreenivas, president of AI startup Decagon, shared how coding agents have already reshaped his team. A project that once needed four or five engineers? Now it takes two. “Everyone can move a lot faster and go a lot farther,” he said.
Cisco President Jeetu Patel revealed that roughly 85% of his company’s engineering workforce — about 18,000 employees — are already using AI. His advice? Stop thinking of AI as a tool. “You have to think of these as digital coworkers that are joining your team,” he said. “You might have a scrum team of two people and six agents, or two people and infinite agents.”
That’s a wild sentence. And it’s already happening.
The China Factor Nobody’s Ignoring
There’s one more storyline that dominated the HumanX floor, and it’s geopolitical. Chinese open-weight AI models are surging. As of April 2026, models like GLM-5.1, Kimi K2.5, and Qwen3.5 dominate industry benchmarks. American companies are already using them — Cursor built its Composer 2 model on Kimi 2.5, and Airbnb’s chatbot leans heavily on Alibaba’s Qwen.
Glean’s Jain summed up the enterprise mindset: “Enterprises today, they’re very wary of depending on one or two providers for all of their AI. They don’t want to work with just one model company, because they know that innovation is happening across many and also in open source.”
The race isn’t just between Anthropic and OpenAI. It’s global. And it’s moving fast.
So, Is Anthropic the New King?
Right now? It sure looks that way. The numbers back it up. The sentiment backs it up. The conference floor backed it up.
But here’s the thing everyone at HumanX agreed on — this industry moves at warp speed. The mood can flip in months. Roseanne Winsek said it best: “These things change so fast. OpenAI will probably be back.”
Stefan Weitz, HumanX co-founder, captured the overall vibe perfectly: “The mood I’m feeling is exuberance and existential terror. I can’t reconcile the two.”
That’s AI in 2026 in a nutshell. Thrilling. Terrifying. And absolutely impossible to look away from.
Sources
- TechCrunch — At the HumanX conference, everyone was talking about Claude
- Business Insider — At a major AI conference, the consensus was clear: Anthropic is the new favorite in Silicon Valley
- CNBC — Vibe check from inside one of AI industry’s main events: ‘Claude mania’
- El-Balad — Anthropic Emerges as Silicon Valley’s New Favorite
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