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If there’s one thing that became clear as 6,500 executives, founders, and investors discussed artificial intelligence at the HumanX conference in San Francisco this week, it’s that OpenAI no longer dominates the industry conversation. At least for now, that distinction belongs to humanity.
Claude Code, Anthropic’s viral coding agent, uses OpenAI, Cursor, and google We offer a powerful alternative.
Despite a spat with the Pentagon that was made public last month and quickly ended up in court, Anthropic is only going from strength to strength. The Pentagon has blacklisted Claude, but two courts have ruled against it, allowing Anthropic to continue working with other federal agencies while the case progresses.
Anthropic’s early strength in the enterprise allowed it to benefit from the surge in popularity of AI coding agents used to generate, edit, and review code. So while OpenAI sparked the generative AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, Anthropic may be best positioned to win contracts from the biggest spenders.
CNBC spoke to 19 HumanX executives and investors, some of whom requested anonymity to speak freely. Here are the top three takeaways.
Claude “became a religion”
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a group of researchers and executives who defected from OpenAI. The startup is valued at $380 billion, making it one of the most valuable privately held companies in the world.
Claude Code opened to the public in May 2025 and was generating more than $2.5 billion in annual revenue as of February. Arvind Jain, CEO of enterprise AI company Glean, said Claude Code has inspired “Claude Mania” and pressured business leaders to adopt it.
“It’s become a religion. That’s the level of mania,” Jain said in an interview. “Guys, go today and ask, ‘If you were given one AI tool, which one would you want?’” The answer would be Claude. ”
On Tuesday, Anthropic announced Claude Mythos Preview, a new AI model with advanced cybersecurity capabilities powered by strong coding and reasoning skills. This model generated a lot of buzz at HumanX, even though its rollout was limited to a select group of about 50 companies.
Victor Riparbelli, CEO of AI video company Synthesia, said Anthropic was able to show focus and discipline with its model and product, which can be difficult for a young, fast-growing company.
“The guys at Anthropic were like, ‘We’re not going to do anything with the video, we don’t care about the audio model, we’re just going to solve the code generation,’ and now we’re here,” Riparbelli said in an interview. “OpenAI had the problem of having to sell six different products, and that just takes up space for the consumer.”
One investor warned that while Anthropic has consistently succeeded in identifying thorny AI use cases, the industry is still young and momentum could easily swing in the other direction.
AI change management
As technology companies work to bring their customers into the AI era, they’re also grappling with how to leverage and deploy agents internally. Even for Silicon Valley startups, keeping up with the pace of change is not easy.
Ashwin Sreenivas, president of AI startup Decagon, said the advent of coding agents has brought about a lot of changes within the company. Decagon changed its interview process to give candidates access to tools and can now rely on a small team of engineers.
A project that would have required four or five engineers “goes down to two engineers because everyone can move faster and go farther,” Sreenivas said in an interview.
For Navrina Singh, CEO of AI governance startup Credo AI, the proliferation of new AI tools is both exciting and worrying. Excessive communication, especially with customers, has become essential, she said.
“What I wasn’t able to do last year and would have required hiring 10 people, I can now actually build over a weekend and deploy for myself and the company,” Singh says. “The fear is that I don’t have control over my own roadmap, and I don’t have control over my commitments to enterprise customers who like more clarity and want a little more stability.”
Existing large technology companies are undergoing similar changes.
Cisco President Jeetu Patel said about 85% of the company’s engineering workforce, or about 18,000 employees, are using AI, but the path to getting there was different than expected. Patel said Cisco initially learned that it needed to prioritize adoption over outcomes and trust that the model’s capabilities would continue to improve.
“You can’t think of these as tools. As the composition of your Scrum team changes, you need to think of them as digital colleagues that join your team,” Patel said at the conference. “You might not have a Scrum team of eight people. You might have a Scrum team of two people and six agents, or two people and an infinite number of agents.”
Competition with China
Qwen3 is Alibaba’s latest large-scale language model, which the company says combines traditional LLM capabilities with “advanced dynamic inference.”
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The fragile two-week ceasefire agreement between the United States and Iran is having a huge impact on energy and financial markets around the world. However, the majority of executives and investors interviewed by CNBC at HumanX this week said they have not yet experienced a direct impact on their business from the recent conflicts in the Middle East.
Rather, they are focused on another pressing geopolitical issue: China’s open-ended model.
In AI, a model is considered open weight if its parameters or factors that improve its output and predictions during training are exposed. As of April, Chinese open-class models such as GLM-5.1, Kimi K2.5, and Qwen3.5 dominate industry benchmarks.
American companies are flocking to the Chinese model. Cursor built Composer 2 models using Kimi 2.5. airbnb CEO Brian Chesky told CNBC in October that his company’s chatbots primarily rely on: alibaba’s Kwen.
Given the US AI industry’s focus on beating China in terms of innovation, there is a strong focus domestically on closing the open weight gap. Two investors told CNBC that they are devoting significant time and resources to this effort, and a third investor said this is one of the key issues for the industry to solve right now.
Glean’s Jain says it’s important to have multiple options.
“The trend we’re seeing is that companies today are becoming very wary of relying on one or two providers for all their AI,” Jain says. “They don’t want to work with just one model company, because they know that innovation is happening in many companies and also in open source. They want options.”
Spotlight: OpenAI slams Anthropic in memo to shareholders
