When 6,500 tech leaders and investors gather at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, it’s usually OpenAI’s home turf. Not this time. Last week’s HumanX conference sent a clear signal: Anthropic is the industry’s new darling.
‘Claude Mania’ is real
CNBC describes the vibe as ‘Claude Mania.’ Glean CEO Arvind Jain puts it bluntly: Claude Code has sparked outright mania, putting business leaders under pressure to deploy it or explain why they haven’t.
That’s not hyperbole. In conversations across the conference floor, Claude Code was consistently cited as the most popular developer tool. TechCrunch reports that Anthropic dominated the discussions, even as many attendees acknowledged strong alternatives from OpenAI, Cursor, and Google.
Beyond the hype
What sets this conference apart from previous AI events: the conversations weren’t about demos and promises anymore. They were about productive workflows, real enterprise deployments. Agentic AI was the dominant theme, and Anthropic is increasingly seen as the company best positioned to win the most lucrative enterprise contracts.
A lot of that comes down to Claude’s strength in code. Claude Code has established itself as a serious competitor to GitHub Copilot and Cursor in just a few months. The combination of a terminal-based workflow, strong code quality, and the growing ecosystem of MCP servers and skills is clearly hitting a nerve.
Mythos as conversation starter
Claude Mythos Preview was also a major talking point. Anthropic’s decision not to release its most powerful model publicly, instead distributing it to security partners through Project Glasswing, sparked intense debate. Some see it as responsible restraint. Others wonder whether Anthropic also landed a clever marketing coup.
My take
What impresses me about this shift: Anthropic has managed to move the conversation from pure model performance to an entire ecosystem. It’s no longer just about who has the best benchmark. It’s about who delivers the most productive workflow. And right now, Anthropic’s package of Claude Code, Cowork, MCP, and the API makes a pretty compelling case.
The question is whether this momentum holds. OpenAI has responded with its new $100 Pro plan and Codex, Google is pushing Gemini hard. But as of mid-April 2026, the industry’s attention clearly belongs to Anthropic.
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