Anthropic's crisis deepens as Claude loses to GPT-5 and Gemini 3 looms

Anthropic bleeds users after throttling scandal while CEO attacks open source. Google's Gemini 3 rumors explode as Microsoft abandons OpenAI for trillion-dollar solo plan.

The AI labs' pecking order just flipped. Anthropic, once the darling of developers everywhere, is hemorrhaging users to OpenAI while facing throttling scandals and CEO controversies. Google's riding high on Gemini 3 rumors. And Microsoft? They're quietly building a trillion-dollar distributed AI network while everyone else fights over supercomputers.

Elon Musk summed up the brutal new reality: "Winning was never in the set of possible outcomes for Anthropic."

Why everyone suddenly hates Claude

Six weeks of hell destroyed Anthropic's reputation. Starting in August, Claude users flooded Reddit with complaints: broken code that previously worked, random Chinese characters in English responses, instructions completely ignored, and the same prompt giving wildly different results.

Users were convinced Anthropic was secretly throttling Claude to save money. Conspiracy theories exploded—maybe they reduced quality during peak hours, swapped in a cheaper model, or intentionally degraded performance to manage costs.

Anthropic's explanation? "Bugs that intermittently degraded responses." Not intentional throttling, just incompetence. The damage was done.

OpenAI struck at the perfect moment. GPT-5 launched explicitly targeting coding—Anthropic's stronghold. Initially drowned out by deprecation drama, developers slowly realized GPT-5 Codex was actually good. Really good.

"GPT-5 Codex is the best product launch of Q4 2025," writes one developer. "It follows instructions, sticks to guidelines, doesn't overcomplicate, and produces optimized code. It beats Claude Code in every way." The numbers don't lie: Codex has more GitHub stars than Claude Code despite launching six weeks later.

Then CEO Dario Amodei poured gasoline on the fire with this take on open source: "I don't think open source works the same way in AI... I've actually always seen it as a red herring. When I see a new model come out, I don't care whether it's open source or not." The backlash was instant. "Dario Amodei is showing his true face," wrote one critic. "Anti-competitive doomer with a love of regulation to control AI. For that reason, he hates open-source AI."

Even Hugging Face's CEO called it a "rare miss" and "quite disappointing."

Amodei also openly challenged Trump's hands-off AI strategy, skipping the White House AI dinner. Now Trump's AI czar David Sacks takes potshots at Anthropic weekly.

The company went from $1 billion to $5 billion revenue this year. But perception is reality, and right now everyone thinks Claude is broken.

The Gemini 3 rumors that have Google winning

While Anthropic burns, Google's vibes are immaculate. Gemini 3 rumors that started in July are reaching fever pitch.

"Good news," writes one insider. "Gemini 3's launch target has been brought forward to early October from mid-October. Only a couple of weeks left now."

Dan Mack's prediction: "It will clearly be the best AI model available, both vibes and benchmark-based. Google has the momentum now, and I don't think anyone is stopping that train."

Google's Kath Cordovez tweeted "Y'all, I'm very excited for next week," sending the rumor mill into overdrive. Turns out it's about Google's coding tools getting major updates, not Gemini 3. But the hype shows how desperately everyone wants Google to win.

The sentiment shift is remarkable. Eighteen months ago, Google AI meant glue on pizza jokes. Now developers are pre-declaring Gemini 3 their "favorite launch of the year" before even seeing it.

One developer wrote: "I'm positive that Gemini 3 will be my favorite launch of the year. There's still hope. GPT-5 and Claude 4 were disappointing."

Even Wall Street's noticing. Amazon's stock is surging on their Anthropic partnership. Wells Fargo analysts see "increased conviction in AWS revenue acceleration" purely from Anthropic's compute needs.

The irony: Anthropic's struggles are making Amazon look good while Anthropic itself bleeds users.

Microsoft's trillion-dollar betrayal

Microsoft's done with OpenAI's moonshot fantasies. While OpenAI builds Stargate—their $100 billion supercomputer—Microsoft's quietly building something bigger.

Reuters reports Microsoft "began to re-evaluate" their OpenAI relationship as compute demands "ballooned." When Oracle and SoftBank stepped in for OpenAI's gigawatt requirements, Microsoft walked away.

Their new strategy: distributed AI infrastructure across the globe instead of "one gargantuan bet." They're building clusters sized for long-term reuse with staged GPU refreshes, supporting inference over training.

"The future of AI isn't another colossal supercomputer in one location," Microsoft believes. "It's a fast distributed web of AI power serving billions globally."

They're also hedging bets. This week, Satya Nadella announced Claude integration into Microsoft 365 Copilot alongside OpenAI. "Our multimodal approach goes beyond choice," he tweeted, barely hiding the dig at their former exclusive partner.

Microsoft was "richly rewarded" for their first OpenAI bet. The billion-dollar question: is playing it safe equally smart?

Meanwhile, Nadella told employees he's "haunted" by the prospect of Microsoft not surviving the AI era. That's why they're building their own path—distributed, practical, and completely independent of OpenAI's increasingly wild ambitions.