AI labs – AI companies are racing past their original niches—model labs are moving into coding platforms, agent builders and even “app builder” experiences—while startups that built their businesses on top of APIs face a growing risk of being undercut or shut out of the
For months, a simple desk exercise has become a warning sign. When you try to map the AI supply chain on paper—labs that make models and chatbots, coding assistants that sit on top of them, then startups building hyper-specific tools—you can feel how fast it’s changing.
The problem isn’t a lack of companies. It’s that they’re rushing into each other’s turf.
The shift is partly financial. Ever-increasing valuations push companies to find new sources of revenue. Becoming a full-stack AI company matters even more as models commoditize quickly and big-ticket IPO plans loom. But the practical impact shows up in product features and customer expectations—sometimes before startups have fully shipped what they’ve been building.
Last year, Anthropic and OpenAI launched Claude Code and Codex, AI coding platforms that rival Cursor and Cognition. Now the overlap is widening again: based on user screenshots on X. Anthropic may be working on an app builder aimed at non-techies. placing it in direct competition with “vibe-coding” stars Lovable. Replit. and Emergent. Anthropic did not confirm the plan.
Emergent’s CEO Mukund Jha said the move wasn’t a surprise. In an April interview, he told the outlet: “It’s not a surprise. We’ve been anticipating this for a while and sort of internally thinking and preparing about it.”
He also offered a sober view of where the real difficulty lies. For Anthropic’s expansion into vibe coding, he said it is not “game over” for his year-old startup. “Coding is relatively like 20%-30% of the work. The hard work is actually taking the application to the last mile,” Jha said. In his view. building secure and production-grade apps—especially for non-technical users—is a tough problem. one that might not be solved by companies that may be “spread thin.”.
AI companies Anthropic OpenAI Claude Code Codex Cursor Cognition Lovable Replit Emergent vibe-coding AI agents Mukund Jha Peter Steinberger OpenClaw Sierra Agentforce Canva Sherlocking APIs consolidation
So basically the big AI companies are stealing the startup ideas again? Cool cool.
I don’t get why people are acting like this is new. Like once the API stuff got popular everyone moved into apps anyway. The “under-cut or shut out” part sounds dramatic but it happens to every industry.
This headline makes it sound like Anthropic is making something called “vibe-coding” for non-techies and that’s automatically bad?? I mean, isn’t coding already like… a bunch of vibes. Also when they say “last mile” I thought it was internet speed stuff.
Every time a company says they’re “commoditizing models” I swear it means they’ll charge you more for the tools around it. Like Cursor/Codex/CouldaBeThings are all the same thing, right? Then the little guys get squeezed out because they built on APIs that stop mattering. Also, if Anthropic doesn’t confirm anything, why are we taking X screenshots as proof? Seems like half the story.