Last week, OpenAI's chief of applications Fidji Simo held an all-hands meeting and told staff that Anthropic's success should serve as a "wake-up call." She said the company has been too distracted by "side quests." She said they need to double down on coding and enterprise productivity. She said — and this is the actual internal quote — "We are very much acting as if it's a code red."

This is the market leader. Publicly, to their whole company.

The Bigger Story

For most of 2025, OpenAI's strategy was what Sam Altman himself called "a bet on a series of startups" — launch everything, own every surface, be everywhere at once. Sora for video. Atlas for browsing. E-commerce in ChatGPT. Hardware with Jony Ive. The logic was: if you're the most exciting company in AI, act like it.

The problem is it stopped working. Computing resources were constantly being pulled between teams. Org structure got opaque. And while OpenAI was busy running a dozen experiments, Anthropic was quietly winning the customers that actually pay.

The Sora story is the sharpest example of what that distraction cost them. The app hit number one on the App Store in September 2025, attracted a billion-dollar Disney licensing deal, and generated enormous press. It also burned through an estimated $15 million per day in compute costs — against a total lifetime revenue of $2.1 million from in-app purchases. Downloads peaked in November and fell 66% by February. On March 24, OpenAI shut it down entirely. Disney walked away. The billion-dollar deal dissolved before a single dollar changed hands.

Meanwhile, Anthropic's annualized revenue surged past $19 billion — up from $9 billion at the end of 2025 — with roughly 80% of that coming from enterprise clients. Dario Amodei confirmed at a Morgan Stanley event that $6 billion in revenue was added in February alone, driven almost entirely by Claude Code. A revenue doubling in two months. In the enterprise market specifically, OpenAI's share has fallen to 27% while Anthropic leads at 40%. Ten weeks ago it was 50/50.

So now OpenAI is pivoting hard. Sora is gone. The browser is being deprioritised. The side projects are being cut. Refocusing on coding tools and enterprise customers. The same playbook Anthropic has been running for two years.

Why You Should Care

For us PMMs, I think the moral of the story (so far!) is focus.

Anthropic won enterprise by refusing to be distracted. No image generation. No video. No hardware. Just: here is what enterprise buyers actually need, and here is how we're better at it than anyone else. That focus is now forcing the most well-funded company in tech to abandon its strategy and copy theirs.

If you’re in product marketing I have a hunch you miiiigghhttt be getting pulled in a few directions. Everything feels like a priority. It’s on you, and only you, to focus your energy and resources on the things that are going to help YOU win in the market 🫵

True story: I used to be genuinely obsessed with Tetris. Like, embarrassingly good at it in school. The satisfaction of rotating pieces, clicking them into place, stacking the board just right, and then waiting for that long skinny piece to drop… BANG! BANG! BANG!

Four rows cleared at once. Pure dopamine. (yeah, boarding school could get boring at times)

And the longer I've been in product marketing, the more it feels like the same game.

You're constantly rotating pieces and dropping them into place. A thought leadership article here, customer stories there, squeeze in product messaging, and update a GTM pitch deck on top… and then the roadmap shifts and half your value props need to move too. New pieces just keep on coming.

When the board clears, it feels like everything. A few weeks ago I was on a call with a buyer and he started describing our positioning almost word for word, unprompted. He talked about how the PMM role is evolving in an AI world (what it's becoming, what it demands) and it mapped almost exactly to the messaging I'd been developing through product conversations, customer calls, and message testing with friendlies. Months of pieces, finally clicking into place.

At level 20, though, the pieces come faster than you can think. And PMMs are playing at this speed with the rate everyone is shipping now thanks to our old pal Claude.

I remember the mental model 14 year-old Adam used: early on you learn the pieces. Squares are stubborn so you stack them left. T-pieces are your best friend because you can wiggle them almost anywhere. But when the speed really cranks up, it stops being analytical. It just becomes flow state.

The PMM equivalent I keep coming back to here is to hold things loosely. As someone with a stubborn streak, it’s a skill I’m constantly learning. Stay flexible enough to rotate your execution without panicking, but keep enough strategic awareness to know where everything eventually needs to land.

The trap at level 20 is reacting to every incoming piece with pure tactics. You pile up sporadic work, you chase things, and suddenly the board is a mess even though you've been busy the whole time. You lose the connective tissue.

Don't be rigid in your execution. But don't lose the picture.

Curious how others are managing the pace? Do you have a mental trick for keeping the board clear when everything is moving fast? Hit reply and let me know.

Jenna got a familiar ask: get up to speed on a competitor fast and put something together for leadership.

One prompt with Klue MCP connected. Claude pulled win reasons with supporting buyer quotes, loss patterns, where the competitor has the edge, and five go-to-market actions all linked back to the sources in Klue. The kind of thing you can put in front of a VP without sweating.

She also ran it without Klue as a control. Without the MCP data, Claude started telling porky pies (made up win stories and buyer quotes) all of it sounding totally plausible and completely made up.

A friendly remind before y’all go off building 👉 the output is only as good as what's powering it.

We went through three other workflows in our live workshop last week, stay tuned for more recipes.

☕ Netflix turned down an $83B content library and immediately bought a 16-person AI startup — its first move after walking away from the biggest media deal in history.

☕ Google built its entire Pixel 10 campaign around the idea that even the most loyal person in sports was willing to switch.

☕ Costco just launched a Celsius dupe — same caffeine, 70 cents a can — and Celsius stock dropped 7% before the drinks even hit most shelves.

☕ United is selling full rows of economy seats that fold into a bed — a direct shot at Delta, which expects premium revenue to overtake main cabin this year.

Stay caffeineted,

– Adam & Hen (don't be a stranger, connect with me on LinkedIn 👋)