The problem is without a platform Anthropic has no stack and will just be bought up by Google when the bubble pops. Same with OpenAI, without some sort of moat, their product requires third party hardware in third party datacenters and they'll be bought by Microsoft.

Alphabet doesn't have this issue. Google doesn't need Gemini to win the "AI product" race. It needs Gemini to make Search better at retaining users against Perplexity and ChatGPT search, to make YouTube recommendations and ad targeting more effective, to make Workspace stickier for enterprise customers, to make Cloud more competitive against AWS, to make Android more useful as a device OS. Every percentage point improvement in any of those existing businesses generates billions in revenue that never shows up on a "Gemini revenue". Any actual "Gemini" revenue is just a bonus.

Anthropic trains on Google TPUs hosted in Google Cloud. Amazon invested billions and hosts Anthropic's models on Bedrock/AWS. So the two possible outcomes for Anthropic are: succeed as a platform (in which case Google and Amazon extract rent from every inference and training run), or fail as a platform and get acquired (in which case Google or Amazon absorb the talent and IP directly)

Hilariously, if the models were open source, Anthropic, OpenAI et al wouldn't be in this situation. Instead, they have no strategic independence to cover for a lack of product independence and have to keep chasing "platforms" and throwing out products no one needs (people need claude. thats it.)