Claude vs. OpenAI Rivalry, Google's Earnings Surprise, OpenAI Ads vs. Anthropic's Constitution
Ilia explores Anthropic's bizarre AI Constitution.
Most pieces go out at 05:30 am EST (usually). AI Supremacy is a Newsletter about AI at the intersection of business, society, tech, human culture and the future of human civilization.
Listen to today’s guest piece:
Good Afternoon,
I didn’t plan on writing a piece today. But a few things happend that I need to talk about. Anthropic Claude Cowork’s plugins, especially for the legal industry has sparked a significant selloff in Software and (legal) analytics related stocks. The new plugin automates contract review, non-disclosure agreement triage, compliance workflows, legal briefings and templated responses, according to the company.
The Capex is getting wild
Meanwhile Alphabet just reported earnings. With Google’s market cap ballooning over $4 Tr. - it’s gotten a bit out of hand. Now Google is saying that it will spend $185 billion CapEx guide for 2026. Alphabet (Google’s parent company) spent approximately $91.45 billion in capital expenditures (capex).
Alphabet’s Earnings are a tell of where AI is heading. As you can see that’s almost double what it spent in 2025. The reality will be even higher by the end of 2026. App Economy broke down some of the numbers:
Google Cloud surged 48% Y/Y ($70B run rate). But the number to watch is the $240B backlog, up 55% sequentially.
With the Gemini app hitting 750M monthly users, Alphabet is aggressively moving toward Agentic Commerce. Chrome’s new Auto Browse and the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) are maturing.
With a fresh $16B round and a $126B valuation, Waymo is no longer a moonshot. It’s a market leader scaling toward a global infrastructure play. 15 million rides in 2025 was just the warm-up with 20+ cities expected in 2026.
Alphabet’s full-stack advantage in AI appears to be widening as OpenAI’s ecosystem building seems to be slow and full of missteps like the gigantic failure that is the Sora app.
Rivalry between Anthropic and OpenAI Heats up 🔥
In a surprising turn of events, Anthropic has decided to take aim at OpenAI’s Advertising push in Super Bowl commercial.
Sam Altman had said that Ads would be a “last resort” but seeing the success of Anthropic over their products, OpenAI appears to have gotten desperate. Anthropic have released several humorous videos showing how inappropriate such ads would look in a live chat. The company also confirmed that it has no plans to add ads to Claude.
The videos attempt to depict how deceptive and ridiculous to the human experience Ads might be in chatbot like interfaces and queries. (Although I do find ChatGPT already sounds like that!)
Anthropic said the personal nature of users’ conversations with Claude would make ads feel “incongruous.” The Comms and PR team behind OpenAI, who presumably run Sam Altman’s X account also began to say some weird stuff on his behalf:
But in a week where it’s clear Codex is getting outcompeted and Claude Cowork plugins are leading to a stock selloff of Software companies that feels like a Software Apocalypse due to AI, Anthropic is getting the press that OpenAI used to get. And the evidence is fairly shocking:
Claude Code / Cowork are Overtaking OpenAI’s Codex
Sam Altman trying to do Ads about Cowork on his X account also show you the degree of desperation in his PR/Comms team. But reality is what it is….
Anthropic’s Revenue is expected to Surge in the late 2020s
Anthropic’s branding is also getting more sophisticated, I really like this Ad they did on YouTube a while back (about 4 months ago):
Alphabet Demonstrates Incumbents (BigTech) Getting Stronger with Gen AI
Google’s AI supremacy in LLMs and their integration in sprawling ecosystem advantages and distribution is showing AI is going to be a winner-takes-all market. Anthropic lost a huge deal with Apple for asking for too much money which Google subsequently won.
Ilia Karelin’s Top recent pieces:
Featured articles by today’s guest contributor:
Commands vs Skills vs Agents in Claude Code: What Nobody Explains
Official Claude Prompting: Everything You Need To Know
I Stopped Scrolling for AI News: How I use Perplexity and Grok to filter hundreds of posts down to what matters
AI Research 101: Learn Perplexity from Scratch In 1 Hour
It already feels like the end of the week, but we are not done. The labor market is showing some AI fatigue and a 2nm revolution in AI hardware is about to begin.
Claude’s AI Constitution is Controversial
 | A guest post by
|