Switching costsweight 15Claude Code — repo config, hooks, MCP servers, months of tuning — is real developer lock-in, stickier than a consumer chat habit. API-only customers can still swap with a config change.
7
—
Network effectsweight 15MCP is a modest developer ecosystem, not a flywheel. Value does not compound with more customers.
3
—
Scale & cost advantageweight 12$517 billion of compute is rented, not owned; no cost advantage over the hyperscalers it rents from.
5
—
Brand & pricing powerweight 12The safety brand plus frontier pricing power. Pace the Frontier made it the author of the slowdown.
8
—
Cornered resourceweight 12Frontier weights, research talent, and the Amazon and Google capital relationships.
8
—
Distribution controlweight 12Sold through Bedrock, Vertex, and the direct API — every pipe belongs to someone else.
5
—
Disruption resilienceweight 12At the frontier and cost-competitive; open-weight commoditization is the standing threat.
7
—
Independenceweight 10Four landlords it also competes with, two unnamed customers at nearly a quarter of revenue with no long-term contracts, and a Pentagon risk designation upheld on appeal — the leaked prospectus made the weakest dimension weaker.
Anthropic's leaked IPO filing shows the fastest revenue ramp in software history. OpenAI is nearing $70 billion a year. We re-scored both moats against the numbers. Revenue went up. One moat went down.
The AI labs cut their prices in the same week. Amazon gave away the software that runs their models, on every cloud. The brains are getting cheap, and Amazon wants to own the body.
