It isn’t just winner takes all anymore(hasn’t been for years?)… I don’t think any reasonable consumer/company would hitch their wagon to one AI provider unless they came with an order of magnitude better quality at competitive costs.. For example, we use Claude Opus 5.5 for particular tasks that justifies its cost, but use self-hosted(not really… hosted on AWS Bedrock, but the point applies in spirit) cheaper models from Anthropic’s competitors and even open weight models for specialized tasks that don’t need the frontier model. Even if Anthropic pulls a huge lead against their competitors, there is no reality where the whole world sticks to Anthropic and shuns cheaper models. This is why their absurd valuation sucks. At reasonable valuation, they are quite a bet because Opus 5.5 is still a great workhorse as of today.