They certainly have internal research efforts underway, but I'm talking about what’s actually been released to end users via the Claude app or API. Their latest public Sonnet release 3.7 (feb 2025) felt pretty incremental compared to Sonnet 3.5 (june 2024), especially when you compare them to OpenAI and Google released models. In terms of the models you can integrate today, Anthropic hasn’t quite kept pace on either reasoning performance or cost efficiency.
Anthropic is now too expensive to be acquired. Only Amazon could be a potential buyer, given that out of the 3 big cloud providers, it's the only one without their own model offering.
Anthropic's strategy seems to go towards "AI as universal glue". They want to tie Claude into all the tools teams already live in (Jira, Confluence, Zapier, etc.). That's a smart move for enterprise adoption, but it also feels like they're compensating for a plateau in core model capabilities.
Both OpenAI and Google continue to push the frontier on reasoning, multimodality, and efficiency whereas Claude's recent releases have felt more iterative. I'd love to see Anthropic push into model research again.