alt Hacker NewsIt really feels like Anthropic's product area is extremely overextended at this point. If they want to extend themselves horizontally in an unlimited fashion, they will need unlimited focus, and agents can't supply that. Things will fall through the cracks. Why should I believe that Anthropic will care about this product in 2, 3 years? Whereas I firmly believe that Figma will care greatly about its product in that time
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It is officially the 2010 Google era at Anthropic (the era where Google released tons of new products and spread themselves too thin).
Anyone remember Google's social media platform??? Google Plus?
This is a good era to be in! Its the era of product experimentation.
As long as you realize that 90% of the products will not be supported long term if it doesn't contribute to bottom line revenue, then just appreciate it for what it is, a bunch of smart people trying to create useful products.
Just don't be surprised if Anthropic goes the Google route, which is shutting down the majority of the products that are too small / not successful enough to impact their revenue.
Locking into products with such low entry cost for 2-3 years is an outdated pov. It's not photoshop that you need to spend months to retraining yourself - the entire selling point of AI-powered software is that you can pick it up in a week and replace or just compliment your existing tools with almost no added effort.
They are building infrastructure components that they will soon wire together with an orchestration layer. Managed agents, scheduled tasks, workflow webhook automation.
Ultimately OAI and ANthropic are destined to crash and burn - they have gambled a lot on LLM's paving the way toward accelerated research, discovery etc etc. But its not happened and its not happening - the only 'large' revenue stream they have all converged on is selling tokens in relation to software production. Which is pretty anti-climatic given all the hyping.
Keeping the hype alive through to IPO is critical now.
Are they, though? My thinking is that their roadmap is heavily focused on the SDLC and solving problems related to software development, so their model will be optimized for that domain. That leaves room in the market for models that are specialized in other areas of expertise.
I feel like it's a good way to build the best PoC in any vertical. Either they create a product, or the big players will but Anthropic can provide them with the infra.
> Why should I believe that Anthropic will care about this product in 2, 3 years?
There's no reason to believe Anthropic will stop caring about this product--they're not Google [1] after all.
> It really feels like Anthropic's product area is extremely overextended at this point.
I don't think so. They have one core product: the Claude model; they're enabling different ways of accessing it. Claude Code for developers, Cowork for general business tasks, and chat for consumers.
This is their first graphic design product, but it fits nicely because once you create a prototype, you can hand it over to Claude Code to make the website, mobile app, or whatever.
The advantage Anthropic has is their ecosystem. A Claude user will be way more productive using Design because all of their context is with Claude; other AI tools don't "know you" the way Claude does. Claude already knows your style and your preferences; it's much more likely to create designs you'd like.
When you go to an AI you don’t normally use, you essentially have to start from scratch.
OpenAI and Anthropic have realized that their entire business is exactly one open weight model drop away from Chinese labs that matches Opus 4.5 performance.
They realized they have no product or ground to stand on. Once such model drops and once chip manufacturers catch up with demand, they are dead, if their only product is inference.
So OpenAI decided to do weird things like buying up all the hardware that exists or will exist in the next 2 years to buy time to build the product. Then launch things like Sora, ChatGPT shopping, ads etc. They seem to be struggling with this.
Anthropic, being late to the game of hoarding up all the hardware, decided to "buy time" by hiding CoT, implementing KYC (especially for Chinese users), to delay the efforts of distillation. The products they build in the interim are SaaS clones designed from the POV of AI agents and tight integrations with their models.
And it seems like Google is just sitting aside, watching things unfold, since their business model doesn't stand on inference.
The most likely scenario is that OpenAI and Anthropic will still crash and burn when such open model is released.
Figma's survival is still questinable though. Most likely scenario is likely that there's going to be an open source alternative that has AI integration at the core level, rather than an afterthought.