Anthropic and OpenAI Quietly Stopped Being API Companies. Nobody Warned the Ecosystem.
In 2023, the business model was clear. Anthropic builds models. Developers access them via API. Developers build products. Users use the products. Anthropic makes money from the API. Everyone wins. This was the foundation on which thousands of companies built their products, raised their funding, and hired their teams. The labs were infrastructure. The ecosystem was the product layer. The…
In 2023, Anthropic and OpenAI operated as API companies, providing developers with access to their models via API, which allowed developers to build products that users consumed. This symbiotic relationship fueled the growth of thousands of companies, leading to significant investments and hiring. However, the model began to dissolve as the labs started competing with most of the ecosystem they had built.
Developers paying for API access began funding products built directly against them. For instance, Claude.ai is no longer a research demo but a full-featured consumer and enterprise product, while ChatGPT has expanded its capabilities beyond chat interfaces. Similarly, Google's Gemini is now embedded in many of its enterprise products, and each of these is a direct consumer and enterprise product that competes with companies built on the APIs that fund their development.
This shift is more concerning than historical analogies, as the labs are moving faster than Microsoft and Apple. The funding that powered the competition has now become a threat to the developers who built their businesses on top of these APIs.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
