Summary: The HumanX AI conference at San Francisco’s Moscone Center drew thousands of tech professionals this week. The agenda centered on how agentic AI — systems capable of autonomously handling business and coding tasks — is being deployed broadly through enterprise and consumer chatbots. When attendees were asked which chatbot they use most, the answer was remarkably consistent: Claude.
On the Floor and in Sessions, Claude Was the Name
Anthropic came up constantly throughout the week — not just in panel discussions, but as a hot topic among expo booth operators. One floor lead explicitly said his team uses Claude extensively and believes ChatGPT and OpenAI have “fallen off.”
This view doesn’t appear to be a minority position. Even as OpenAI closed a record $122B fundraising and approaches an IPO, it’s increasingly struggled to shake a public perception of “lost direction.”
OpenAI’s Problem: Loss of Focus, or Bad Timing?
Part of the issue stems from external perceptions of OpenAI’s lack of focus. Last month, the company cut several long-running side projects, including the Sora AI video generation tool and a controversial “sexy” version of ChatGPT, redirecting resources toward enterprise services and coding tools.
A series of negative stories hasn’t helped either. The New Yorker published an in-depth piece questioning CEO Sam Altman. OpenAI’s relationship with the Trump administration hasn’t burnished its public image. And the company’s decision to run ads in ChatGPT sparked user backlash.
At a HumanX conversation, Sierra co-founder and CEO Bret Taylor — also OpenAI’s board chair — defended Altman when asked about the New Yorker piece: “I think Sam is one of the most compelling leaders in the world. If you want to find people who oppose him, you’ll find a lot of them, and they’ll be very vocal.” He added: “I think Sam is an extraordinary leader in AI, and having worked with him, I genuinely trust his character.”
Not “Falling Off” — Just No Longer the Undisputed Champion
This kind of controversy and wavering can make OpenAI look reactive rather than proactive. But looking at revenue and market position, OpenAI and Anthropic are running neck-and-neck — or at least that’s what the surface suggests. The Wall Street Journal recently analyzed both companies’ financials and concluded they are “the fastest-growing enterprises in tech history.”
In other words, OpenAI’s “falling off” may simply mean it’s no longer the undisputed champion. It has competition. In most industries, that’s completely normal.
OpenAI’s Response: The $100/Month Pro Plan
Nonetheless, OpenAI clearly isn’t giving up its throne. This week the company announced a $100/month ChatGPT subscription tier with significantly higher Codex (coding tool) usage limits. The move is clearly aimed at driving broader Codex adoption while trying to win back users from Claude Code.
Agentic Coding Takes Center Stage
At the conference, OpenAI B2B applications CTO Srinivas Narayanan spoke with Bloomberg’s Rachel Metz about the pace of change: “We are in an incredible era of technology, where every month, even every day, there’s something new worth anticipating.” Using agentic coding as an example: “We knew AI would impact software engineering, and people have been using AI-assisted coding for the past year — but in just the past few months, the entire space has completely reshuffled.”
Agentic applications are clearly the current obsession of the tech community. Other AI use cases — like creative generation — haven’t fully matured, but enterprises are handing significant workloads to these new automation assistants at a surprising pace. In such an unpredictable environment, the future remains wide open.
Sources
- Original: At the HumanX conference, everyone was talking about Claude — Lucas Ropek, TechCrunch (2026-04-12)
