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BT Ben Thompson Ben Thompson Writes Stratechery, a subscription newsletter analyzing the business strategy behind tech and media companies, and has built a reputation for framing how platfo...

“OpenAI is kind of like mainline. They go to church every Sunday. They're sort of like evangelicals. That's Anthropic.”

Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) · Money & Markets · August 2026

“OpenAI is kind of like mainline. They go to church every Sunday. They're sort of like evangelicals. That's Anthropic.” — Ben Thompson, Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy)

Ranking the frontier AI labs by their setups, Ben Thompson argues OpenAI and Anthropic have the biggest upside because of how completely their teams believe in the mission, comparing the two companies to different strands of religious devotion.

Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) · 2026-08-18 Listen to the episode → More from Ben Thompson → More Money & Markets quotes →

Transcript

Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy) Around 56:35 into the episode
Ben Thompson

…in terms of your supply chain and making hard decisions is very, very different than everything that goes into like making great AI. I'm generally prefer companies to do what they're good at. So from my perspective, I'm fine with Apple not doing AI. I want them to keep making great devices. Of

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

the five potential frontier AI winners, so OpenAI Anthropic, Gemini, SpaceX AI, Grok, and Meta, which of those firms do you think has the most interesting setup?

Ben Thompson

Open AI and Anthropic obviously are the riskiest, but also have the biggest upside. Never discount, number one, the power of belief. They think they're creating God. The most impactful things in history have usually been fueled by religion. The two religious organizations in Silicon Valley are OpenAI is kind of like mainline. They go to church every Sunday. They're sort of like evangelicals. That's Anthropic. They're all in. It is core to their belief. That goes a long way. The fact you need to make a business work for you to survive goes a very long way. Google just needs search to not die too quickly. Meta has the huge advertising business. In a world where Meta was run by anyone other than Mark Zuckerberg, they would not be on the leading edge. That is one of the purest manifestations of founder…

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

You've written a lot about this recently.

Ben Thompson

I think there's a very good case to make that it is more reckless to not be on the frontier if you're a digital company. The counter to meta is actually Microsoft. Microsoft is not on the frontier. The reason why Microsoft has $20 million of free cash flow last quarter, Microsoft paid a $10 billion…

Patrick O'Shaughnessy

did IBM do? What's the analogy? Well,

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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