50 AI Predictions for 2026 - Part 2

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on The AI Daily Brief, part two of my AI predictions for 2026 The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
All right, so yesterday, we did the first part of my AI predictions, and because it got so long, we had to split it into two. Today, we are jumping in in the competition section where the AI race is headed into 2026
For our next set of predictions, let's talk about competition. My first prediction is that I think it's gonna be very hard to shake Anthropic off its coding lead. They are incredibly focused on it. They have held that perceived lead for more than a year and a half, which is approximately 100 years in AI time. And you can absolutely tell that an increasingly large number of developers are so comfortable with the cloud models that even when OpenAI or Google or in the future Grok release something that is comparable or ahead on the benchmarks, it'll be very unlikely that they switch. Now, that won't be universally true. There's still lots and lots of room. And so I think it makes sense for everyone else to compete for coding still. I just think it's gonna be hard to shake Anthropic off their lead. One specific prediction is that I think that this will lead ultimately to Microsoft doing a big deal with them, expanding that relationship even from the very nascent ways we started to see them get together this year. I think Microsoft will want to bring even more aggressively Anthropics coding tools into their enterprise suite. And I wouldn't be surprised to see that happen in 2026 Now for OpenAI, I think their big challenge is going to be fragmented attention. How much should they focus on consumer usage versus enterprise usage versus research that gets them to AGI? We've recently gotten a bunch of reports from inside OpenAI that not everyone there is super happy with the allocation of resources. And are worried that all of these consumer things, like Sora 2, are side quests that are actually distracting them from fundamental AGI research. Certainly OpenAI itself has talked about the difficulty of having to make hard decisions about where to allocate compute. I do not believe in 2026 that OpenAI is going to seed any of these things. However, I do think that there will likely be some recognition that where they are dominant is on consumer. To many people, ChatGPT still is the same as AI. These are synonymous terms. And even as Gemini has surged, ChatGPT still has a commanding lead. My guess is that to the extent that OpenAI has to defend one flank, that will be it. Now one additional specific prediction is that I just believe that it's inevitable that ads will come to ChatGPT. If for no other reason, then if you look at charts of intent and how users that are sourced from an LLM interact as opposed to people coming from Google search, it's just a really good medium for advertising. I think OpenAI is going to continue to face questions in the market as to whether they can actually reach their heady revenue targets. And given that they have so much tied up in whether the market believes they can when it comes to funding all of this infrastructure, I think they're going to have to do some version of advertising. How well they do that and whether it causes a user rebellion will be key things to watch for in the coming year. Now let's talk about Grok. I have occasionally been accused by some of you of not giving Grok its due. Some of you have even secretly suggested that I am an Elon Musk hater, which is not true. The reason that Grok has come up less is that across all of the different use cases, where I try all the different models on basically everything I'm doing, I have yet to find a single use case where I regularly prefer Grok's output compared to Gemini, ChatGPT, or Claude. Every other one of those models has something I prefer better than the others. However, I still pay for Grok's most premium subscription, and I think if you judge Grok on the speed with which they have become a contender, and are putting out models that are very near state-of-the-art, if not there exactly, you cannot write them off as a contender in the AI race. What's more, Elon is in a unique position to raise capital and apply compute, and you could see a compute investment-based leapfrogging. It's also possible that external factors like political pressure and constraints on others that Elon just decides to ignore could also create RAs on debt for Grok in a way that I don't see right now. I basically just don't know who the natural user is, other than someone who's already on Twitter, which to be fair is not an insignificant number of people. One good thing in Grok's favor is that if you look at OpenRouter, who Grok have partnered with to offer free tokens at various points this year, it is very clear that users have shown that they will use Grok if it's free or cheap, which by the way is not a knock on Grok. It's still early enough that people are willing, in many cases, to use a more expensive model than a less expensive one if it actually gets what they want done. So the fact that Grok has done so well on OpenWriter with those promotions is actually indicative of where it could go. But ultimately, if over the course of not just 26, but more like 26 and 27 and maybe even a little into 28, if it can't really differentiate itself and find some breakout that gives it a space relative to these others in the competition, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw some mass absorption of the Elon Empire all under, for example, the banner of Tesla.