The AI world is rapidly changing. Where once OpenAI and its ChatGPT creation stood alone as the clear winner of AI, the picture is no longer as clear, with triumphant rises from both Anthropic and Gemini.
For the longest time, both of these companies were stuck behind OpenAI, trying to carve out a niche for themselves to stay relevant alongside OpenAI’s relentless monopoly of the market. But two recent updates, Gemini 3 and Claude Opus 4.5, show that Anthropic and Gemini might actually be the real winners right now. Here's why.
How Gemini 3 is taking over
For Google, Gemini 3 was a massive update. Upon release, it instantly saw success with the public, turning the Gemini chatbot into the best version of itself.
Not just that, but Google went about implementing Gemini 3 wherever it could. Google’s AI Mode improved, as did Google’s AI image generator with the introduction of Nano Banana Pro, and services including Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Maps are all getting the Gemini 3 treatment.
With this latest release, Gemini got some important updates it was missing. It gained an AI agent for completing tasks on your behalf, as well as new vibe coding tricks for creating interactive tools and a better shopping experience via the Gemini app.
However, it is not just the new features; Gemini is just better all around. Upon release, the tech industry was quick to praise it.
Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, took to X, stating, “I’ve used ChatGPT every day for 3 years. Just spent 2 hours on Gemini 3. I’m not going back. The leap is insane — reasoning, speed, images, video… everything is sharper and faster”.
Holy shit. I’ve used ChatGPT every day for 3 years. Just spent 2 hours on Gemini 3. I’m not going back. The leap is insane — reasoning, speed, images, video… everything is sharper and faster. It feels like the world just changed, again. ❤️ 🤖 https://t.co/HruXhc16MqNovember 23, 2025
Andrej Karpathy, ex Director of AI at Tesla also took to X during early access, stating “I had a positive early impression yesterday across personality, writing, vibe coding, humor etc, very solid daily driver potential, clearly a tier 1 LLM, congrats to the team!”
Even Sam Altman and Elon Musk, the CEO’s of two of Gemini’s biggest competitors, were quick to complement its success.
Even Sam Altman and Elon Musk, the CEO’s of two of Gemini’s biggest competitors, were quick to complement its success.
This praise is backed up by Gemini’s dominating position in the benchmarks. As reported by The Verge, co-founder and CTO of popular benchmarking service LMArena, Wei-Lin Chiang, believed that Gemini 3 Pro holds a clear lead in occupational categories, including coding, creative writing and agentic coding abilities.
Gemini 3 Pro also now has the top spot on visual comprehension, becoming the first model to surpass a 1500 score on the platform's text leaderboard.
The Verge goes on to note that Gemini 3 scored almost twice as high as OpenAI’s GPT-5 Pro on ARC AGI 2, a well-known and important test for AI models to measure their reasoning. This difference to GPT-5 Pro was achieved while running at one-tenth of the cost per task of GPT-5 Pro.
Benchmarks can seem somewhat abstract, but what it means is that Gemini has done multiple things with Gemini 3. Not only is it seemingly topping the majority of leaderboards for key benchmarks, but it has also won over key members of the tech and AI industry.
Despite all of this, Google has stated that Gemini 3 should be easier than ever for the average person to use, allowing for a more intuitive prompting experience that takes away the emphasis on prompt engineering.
Where Anthropic shines
So Gemini is shining bright right now, winning over execs and smashing benchmarks… where does Anthropic stand in all of this?
Unlike both ChatGPT and Gemini, Anthropic has taken a very different route with its AI chatbot. There are no image or video generators, there are no fun extra tools, and a lack of majorly risky moves.
In fact, when it comes to AI, Anthropic is seriously focused. The company’s AI model, Claude, is focused on being the best it can be at coding, productivity and work-based tasks.
While it is available for the public to use, and remains one of the chatbots on the market, Anthropic’s financial model relies on businesses. This has worked in its favor, as we’ve previously reported, Anthropic has found a safe business model compared to its competitors, relying on the steady and reliable income of large businesses that want consistent AI.
With its latest update, Claude Opus 4.5, Anthropic has leaned even further into this. The new model is better at coding. It is also smarter at dealing with Excel spreadsheets and work documents, problem-solving, and troubleshooting.
As Anthropic said in its announcement post, “It’s intelligent, efficient, and the best model in the world for coding, agents, and computer use. It’s also meaningfully better at everyday tasks like deep research and working with slides and spreadsheets.”
When Tom’s Guide recently spoke to Anthropic’s Scott White, product lead for Claude AI, for an upcoming interview, he emphasized the future of Claude, able to save you hours at work on boring tasks, becoming an effective programmer, manager or simply the tool you use to take on your time-consuming jobs.
Through this focus, Claude is doing the same thing as Gemini, topping leaderboards and outranking competitors in a number of key areas.
In other words, while ChatGPT and Gemini fight it out to be the world’s favorite chatbot, Anthropic is playing a separate game, looking to become the chatbot used by businesses around the world, and it is succeeding at that game.
What does this all mean?
AI is absolutely everywhere these days, but a small handful of companies are leading the charge. Realistically, Google, Anthropic and OpenAI are currently three of the biggest by quite a long way.
For a long time, OpenAI has led the way with ChatGPT, outperforming its competitors as the favorite choice. While ChatGPT seems to be holding onto this reputation, that does appear to be changing.
Gemini’s popularity in the Apple Store is surging, and finding its way into just about every product Google has, it is becoming hard to avoid.
As for Anthropic, it has quickly cornered a key market of the AI world that currently seems untouchable, gaining the interest of the corporate tech world with its prowess in coding and work-related tasks.
The scales will likely change again, but ChatGPT has never seen competition quite like this. What an exciting time for AI.
Follow Tom's Guide on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds.
More from Tom’s Guide
- I tried ChatGPT’s new shopping research feature — it found all of the best Black Friday deals in minutes
- 'That’s it? It’s so simple': OpenAI's Sam Altman teases screenless device with Jony Ive
- I just tested ChatGPT Atlas vs. Chrome with Gemini 3.0 — and there's a clear winner
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
