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Published on 05.02.2026
TLDR: Anthropic's Claude is gaining significant market momentum with powerful legal plugins while Google aggressively doubles its CapEx spending to $185 billion for 2026, and OpenAI appears to be losing competitive ground and resorting to controversial ad strategies.
Summary:
The AI landscape is experiencing a fundamental realignment. Anthropic's Claude and its new Cowork plugins, particularly for the legal industry, have sent shockwaves through the market. These plugins automate contract review, non-disclosure agreement triage, compliance workflows, legal briefings, and templated responses with such effectiveness that they've triggered significant selloffs in software and legal analytics stocks. This is significant because it signals that AI isn't just improving productivity anymore—it's beginning to fundamentally replace entire categories of software that companies have built their business models around. The speed of disruption is accelerating faster than market participants anticipated.
Meanwhile, Alphabet reported earnings that reveal the massive capital commitment the company is making to AI infrastructure. Google's market cap has crossed $4 trillion, and the company is planning to invest $185 billion in capital expenditures for 2026, nearly doubling the approximately $91.45 billion spent in 2025. These numbers tell us something crucial: companies see AI as a winner-takes-all market that requires full-stack vertical integration. Google Cloud surged 48% year-over-year with a $70 billion run rate, and the $240 billion backlog—up 55% sequentially—shows extraordinary demand. With the Gemini app hitting 750 million monthly users, Alphabet is executing on agentic commerce. Chrome's Auto Browse and the Universal Commerce Protocol are maturing, and Waymo, once considered a moonshot, has just raised $16 billion at a $126 billion valuation, positioning itself as a true market leader in autonomous transportation.
What's remarkable is how Alphabet's full-stack advantage in AI continues to widen while OpenAI's ecosystem building appears sluggish and filled with missteps. The Sora app, which was supposed to be a major play, has been a notable failure. Meanwhile, Anthropic is eating OpenAI's lunch in terms of brand perception and product momentum. The company took a bold stance by publicly mocking OpenAI's recent Super Bowl advertising push, releasing humorous videos showing how inappropriate and deceptive ads would appear in chatbot interfaces. Anthropic has been explicit: Claude will not have ads because the personal nature of user conversations would make advertisements feel fundamentally incongruous with the user experience. This is a sharp rebuke to Sam Altman's pivot toward advertising as a revenue model, especially after he claimed ads would be a "last resort."
For teams and architects evaluating AI platform investments, this shift carries profound implications. The companies winning in this market are those choosing to integrate AI deeply into their core infrastructure and product experience, not those treating it as a bolt-on feature. The legal industry's disruption signals that vertical solutions with specialized Claude plugins will outcompete horizontal platforms that try to do everything. Organizations need to think carefully about how they'll compete when AI commoditizes large portions of their existing software stack. The real winners will be those who use AI to create entirely new categories of value rather than simply automating existing workflows.
Key takeaways:
Tradeoffs:
Link: Claude vs. OpenAI Rivalry, Google's Earnings Surprise, OpenAI Ads vs. Anthropic's Constitution