Is Anthropic's Dominance a Mirage?

Is Anthropic’s Dominance a Mirage?

It’s 2012, and I'm stepping off a plane in Phuket with four of my college friends. The air hits you like a warm, wet blanket. We're headed to a place we booked through Groupon, and I'm not kidding, the deal was so insane it felt like a total scam.

Flights from Hong Kong.

Four nights in a three-bedroom pool villa.

Access to a couple of beat-up mopeds.

All for something like $200 or $300 total.

We felt like we were getting away with something, all of this for less than a semester’s worth of textbooks.

Groupon was the golden ticket, the name you associated with a value so good it didn't feel real.

Why didn’t it feel real…because it wasn’t.

Groupon was killer for customers, terrible for businesses.

And now with Claude Code, I can’t help but thinking history may be repeating

The all-you-can-eat coding tool offers developers access to insane computing power for a relatively low price of $200 a month.

It’s an unbelievable deal, right?

For developers, yes.

For Anthropic, tbd.

Menlo Ventures "2025 Mid-Year LLM Market Update," revealed Anthropic has officially surpassed OpenAI in enterprise LLM usage, capturing 32% of the market.

The engine behind this phenomenal growth?

Code generation.

On the surface, this is a massive victory.

Anthropic identified the killer app, executed flawlessly winning developer mindshare.

But as I read the data, a nagging question emerges, is Anthropic becoming this generation's Groupon?