Comment by hv23
7 hours ago
Digging in here more... why would you say it isn't in Anthropic's interest to win the "agentic coding UI" market?
My mental model is that these foundation model companies will need to invest in and win in a significant number of the app layer markets in order to realize enough revenue to drive returns. And if coding / agentic coding is one of the top X use cases for tokens at the app layer, seems logical that they'd want to be a winner in this market.
Is your view that these companies will be content to win at the model layer and be agnostic as to the app layer?
My intuition is that their fundamental business is executing on the models, and any other products are secondary and exist to drive revenue that they can use to compete against Google/OpenAI/Meta as well as to ensure - and demonstrate - that their models are performant in these new markets. Claude needs to be great at coding, but Anthropic doesn’t need to own Coding. Claude Code is growing their core business, just like a Claude Robotics or a Claude Scheduling might, but they cant focus on robotics or scheduling because that takes them away from the core business of models. A strategic relationship with Cursor might have been enough to accomplish this, but it wasn’t - maybe Cursor couldn’t execute fast enough, or didn’t align on priorities, or whatever. I’ve watched a bunch of interviews with the CC team and I very much get the impression that it was more “holy shit, this works great” than a product strategy.
You may be right about “they need to invest in and win” in order to have __enough__ revenue to outcompete the nation-state sized competition, but this stuff is moving way to fast for anyone know.
> A strategic relationship with Cursor might have been enough to accomplish this, but it wasn’t
It’s a huge risk as Cursor can get acquired, just like what this news article is about.