Money is the most honest transaction, if people are paying money to anthropic it means its solving their pain. Its the same reason OpenAI and others are copying Anthropic.
This is some late-stage capitalist cope. Money goes to the person who can hoodwink people into thinking their product will do something they care about, not the person with the product that actually does something people want. There are a litany of examples of people swearing up and down by products that have been scientifically proven to __DO NOTHING__. The correlation between popularity and quality is tenuous AT BEST.
People discount Google/Deepmind but a lot of the original research was done there including inventing transformers which form the basis of the other AI companies.
If anything, the amount of original and foundational research at Google is a black mark against their position now. They blew a hell of a lead.
I’m willing to discount what they did almost a decade ago (“Attention is All You Need” was 2017) in an industry that moves this quickly. The execution of an Anthropic matters more now.