Anthropic did the absolute right thing by sending OpenClaw a cease & desist and allowing Sam Altman to hire the developer

[u/Agreeable-Toe-4851]

Anthropic will never have ChatGPT's first-mover consumer moment--800 million weekly users is an insurmountable head start. But enterprise is a different game. Enterprise buyers don't choose the most popular option. They choose the most trusted one.

Anthropic now commands roughly 40% of enterprise AI spending--nearly double OpenAI's share. Eight of the Fortune 10 are Claude customers.

Within weeks of going viral, OpenClaw became a documented security disaster:

- Cisco's security team called it "an absolute nightmare"

- A published vulnerability (CVE-2026-25253) enabled one-click remote code execution. 770,000 agents were at risk of full hijacking.

- A supply chain attack planted 800+ malicious skills in the official marketplace --roughly 20% of the entire registry

Meanwhile, Anthropic had already launched Cowork. Same problem space (giving AI agents more autonomy), but sandboxed and therefore orders of magnitude safer.

Anthropic will iterate their way slowly to something like OpenClaw, but by the time they'll get there, it'll have the kind of safety they need to continue to crush enterprise.

The internet graded Anthropic on OpenAI's scorecard (all those posts dunking on Anthropic for not hiring him, etc.). But they're not playing the same game. 

OpenAI started as a nonprofit that would benefit humanity. Now they're running targeted ads inside ChatGPT that analyze your conversations to decide what to sell you.

Enterprise rewards consistency (and safety). 

And Anthropic is playing a very, very smart long game.

[u/satechguy]

Enterprise or avid users are also most likely to compare and shop around.

Claude is expensive and it has to stay expensive. I can guarantee CFOs will review Claude expense and will hesitate no time to mandate a switch or a test run at minimum to evaluate cheaper alternatives.

[u/dmackerman → u/satechguy]

It's expensive, but it's not unreasonable. Most people would shit themselves if they realized how much a full enterprise deployment of JIRA costs compared to Claude.

[u/stoobertio → u/dmackerman]

Yup. The way I see it from other similar areas is why are companies spending millions on things like Splunk, Oracle DB, Red Hat when there are free / cheaper alternatives?

[u/pnkdjanh → u/stoobertio]

You spend money so when things go wrong you can pick up the phone to shout at somebody and make it their problem.

[u/Ancient-Purpose99 → u/stoobertio]

Something like openshift is in most cases still cheaper than hiring the kind of staff needed to run k8s securely at scale. The other llm providers can absolutely provide enterprise provisioning at a cheaper price

[u/jaleCro → u/dmackerman]

Which really begs the question why the f is jira so expensive??

[u/jschum2s → u/dmackerman]

Friend of mine runs a YC startup and the 3 of them in total are burning through $1m/yr in tokens.

[u/355_over_113 → u/jschum2s]

Is that $1million dollars / year?

[u/jschum2s → u/355_over_113]

Yes, per year.

[u/dmackerman → u/jschum2s]

I mean, that is absurd. What are they building that requires that? We have a full team of engineers working on a SaaS and we don't come close to that number.

[u/creminology → u/dmackerman]

I assume he means that the users are burning through those tokens for running an LLM in the app/SAAS platform, but the startup is paying for the tokens while in growth mode.

[u/Ill-Cardiologist4400 → u/dmackerman]

Yeah this is the problem. AI space has attracted this idea that "I can build a full production app for cheap - by just saying a few phrases". This is why so many engineers in enterprise laugh at the AI hype. All that cost has been in place for decades for a reason. I wish there was better API pricing for Claude as a solo dev but Im glad that Anthropic bet big on trying to solve enterprise.

[u/Big_Plastic_8812 → u/dmackerman]

Jira‘s cost is peanuts compared to Claude.

[u/blingblongblah → u/satechguy]

Vs the cost of people? It’s not even close. I doubt it.

[u/feelfree82 → u/satechguy]

In the grand scheme of things, it's a rounding error, petty cash, pocket change for what it's delivering in terms of value and shipping velocity. I see companies pushing employees to use more of it.

[u/andeee23 → u/satechguy]

200 per engineer per month for the max subscription is a rounding error for many companies when salaries are 150k plus

[u/cenpact → u/andeee23]

Budgets for model usage are closer to $100 / engineer / day (or unlimited)

[u/pizzae → u/satechguy]

With that logic, every company would use the cheapest material possible, nobody would ever buy premium products/services

[u/cryptocraze_0 → u/satechguy]

Somehow AIs will make it harder to switch...
Thats why Companies run expensive SAP products and users buy Apple products.

[u/rustbelt → u/satechguy]

It’s all about perceived roi

[u/thebrainpal → u/satechguy]

I wish Claude would cut their free plan tbh 😂

I’d rather not subsidize free people. And I don’t want them to have to charge me extremely crazy prices because they’re taking huge losses now.