Big news this week in AI: Google and Anthropic just delivered crushing blows to lots of their competitors.
Anthropic dropped Claude Cowork, a user-friendly “general purpose AI agent,” to much fanfare. Cowork, built on the already successful Claude Code, can essentially help even non-techies read, analyze, and tweak all the files on their own computers. As Fortune AI reporter Bea Nolan notes, that could mean a death sentence for dozens of startups that are trying to do the same thing.
Meanwhile, Google and Apple (No. 4) struck a monumental AI deal, where Apple essentially threw in the towel on its own AI efforts and announced that it would use Google Gemini to power its future AI-driven apps and services, including an updated version of Siri that will drop later this year.
This partnership continued a hot streak for Google; parent company Alphabet (No. 7) saw its market cap top $4 trillion on the news. It’s also a major blow to OpenAI, which had partnered with Apple to offer ChatGPT on iOS devices but was never given exclusivity. It’s another reason why Sam Altman is putting so much energy toward nailing a future consumer device for AI with the help of Apple veteran Jonny Ive. If you can’t control the devices through which you’re distributed, you can’t guarantee your LLM will get massively used and stay that way. Probably not coincidentally, OpenAI announced yesterday that it would start testing ads in ChatGPT responses.
All this action, and it’s only 17 days into a year that will clearly be a defining one for all major AI players in their continual fight for dominance.
The AI battlefield will likely be one of the hot topics discussed next week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where Fortune editors (including myself) will descend starting tomorrow. We will be meeting with lots of CEOs and world leaders and bringing the coverage to you live throughout the week. You can follow along on Fortune’s homepage, where we will have dedicated coverage, and via our CEO Daily newsletter, which will become a special Davos dispatch this week. Subscribe here.
Another thing to look out for: Our next issue of the magazine. I’ve got a bunch stashed in my suitcase, and you can read one of our features online, How Netflix (No. 116) swallowed Hollywood, here.
