Walk the floor at any major AI conference and you’d usually expect one name to dominate the conversation. For three years running, that name was ChatGPT. At this year’s HumanX gathering in San Francisco, something shifted. Thousands of techies descended on the Moscone Center, and across panels, booths, and side conversations, Claude kept coming up. The chatbot people weren’t talking about? ChatGPT.
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The short answer for why is Claude Code. Since its public launch in May 2025, the coding agent has grown to generate more than $2.5 billion in annualised revenue, and the people building software products have taken notice. Arvind Jain, CEO of enterprise AI company Glean, called it “Claude Mania” and described it as a religion at this point. “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,” he said.
Part of what makes that kind of endorsement meaningful is who’s saying it. HumanX isn’t a consumer tech crowd. It draws the practitioners actually implementing AI systems, CTOs, engineering leads, and product managers making million-dollar deployment decisions. When that room stops talking about OpenAI and starts talking about a competitor, it’s worth paying attention to.
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At last year’s HumanX in Las Vegas, OpenAI was widely regarded as the clear winner. This year, Roseanne Winsek from Renegade Partners put it very well according to El-Balad, “In Vegas last year, it felt like OpenAI was the clear winner, and now it seems like Anthropic is miles ahead.”
Anthropic also used the conference to unveil something new. Claude Mythos Preview was announced at HumanX, featuring advanced cybersecurity capabilities. Though access is currently limited to around 40-50 companies, its coding and reasoning strengths sparked considerable interest. “The Mythos model is a huge deal,” said Tomasz Tunguz from Theory Ventures.
The bigger picture is a company that has done the unglamorous work. Despite a public spat with the Pentagon that landed in court last month, Anthropic has only gained momentum. It now carries a $380 billion valuation and has raised around $30 billion in funding, with its revenue run-rate reported at approximately $14 billion.
At HumanX, the prevailing sentiment was that Anthropic has gone from a well-regarded alternative to the name on everyone’s lips. OpenAI still leads on brand recognition, distribution, and capital. But for the practitioners in that room, the conversation has moved on.
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