AI Industry Update: Cowork, Personal Intelligence, and IPO Preparations

The Opening Act of 2026: Major AI Moves

TLDR: Early 2026 has seen significant AI announcements from all major players - Anthropic shipped Cowork (bringing Claude Code capabilities to desktop), Google introduced Gemini Personal Intelligence with deep ecosystem integration, and OpenAI expanded into advertising. Behind the scenes, both Anthropic and OpenAI are preparing for historic IPOs.

The AI industry kicked off 2026 at full sprint. Within the first two weeks, we've seen three major announcements that signal where the competitive battle is heading. Anthropic pushed out Cowork five days ago, Google introduced Gemini's Personal Intelligence three days ago, and OpenAI confirmed they're expanding into ads in ChatGPT. Each move represents a different strategic bet on how AI should integrate into daily life.

The Cowork story is particularly fascinating because of its origin. Boris Cherny joined Anthropic in September 2024 with a mandate to prototype new products. His first creation was almost comically mundane - a command-line tool that used Claude to identify what music was playing during work sessions. Then a colleague, Cat Wu, suggested adding filesystem access. "Suddenly, this agent was really interesting," Cherny recalled. Claude could now autonomously explore codebases, read files, and follow import chains. What started as a musical curiosity became Claude Code.

The adoption numbers are staggering. Within five days of internal release in November 2024, 50% of Anthropic's engineering team was using it daily. By July 2025, the tool processed 195 million lines of code weekly across 115,000 developers. In November 2025 - just six months after public launch - Claude Code hit $1 billion in annualized revenue. The accidental product became Anthropic's fastest-growing business. What makes this story architecturally significant is that Anthropic built Cowork using their own tools - Claude Code essentially coded Claude Cowork. This recursive capability hints at something Anthropic's chief scientist Jared Kaplan has discussed: the potential for beneficial recursive self-improvement in AI products.

Google's approach with Personal Intelligence takes a fundamentally different angle. Rather than focusing on execution capability, Google is leveraging their absurd ecosystem advantage. Gemini Personal Intelligence acts as a unified reasoning engine across your entire Google ecosystem - your Gmail threads, Photos library, Search history, and YouTube watch patterns. When you add persistent memory to that kind of data access, you get something approaching the AI assistant from the movie "Her." Reports suggest many ChatGPT users have been switching to Gemini in recent months precisely because of this personalization depth.

For architects and teams evaluating these platforms, the strategic divergence is worth noting. Anthropic is betting on execution capability and autonomy - AI that can actually do work. Google is betting on context and personalization - AI that deeply understands you. OpenAI, meanwhile, is focusing on monetization breadth with their ad expansion, which suggests a different growth thesis entirely. The upcoming IPOs for both Anthropic and OpenAI will likely force clearer articulation of these strategies.

The timing of all these announcements isn't accidental. Google's Personal Intelligence is planned to coincide with their AI-powered smart glasses that will integrate Gemini. This is timed to compete with Apple's AR glasses and OpenAI's AI wearables. So 2026 will bring not just the historic AI IPOs but also a wave of wearables designed to make these AI assistants physically present in daily life.

Key takeaways:

• Claude Code went from internal prototype to $1 billion ARR in under a year - fastest growth in Anthropic's history
• Anthropic built Cowork using Claude Code, demonstrating recursive product development capabilities
• Google's Personal Intelligence leverages ecosystem integration (Gmail, Photos, Search, YouTube) for deep personalization
• OpenAI is expanding into advertising, representing a different monetization strategy than Anthropic or Google
• Both Anthropic and OpenAI are preparing for IPOs in 2026, which will be among the largest AI-focused public offerings

Tradeoffs:

• Anthropic prioritizes execution autonomy but requires users to learn new workflows for project delegation
• Google maximizes personalization through ecosystem access but increases privacy exposure across services
• OpenAI diversifies revenue with ads but risks degrading the core chat experience that made them successful

Link: Cowork, Personal Intelligence, Ads in ChatGPT and the Great Beyond

The summaries provided are based on my analysis and may not fully represent the original authors' perspectives. I recommend reading the original articles for complete context.