Your Favorite AI Has a Moat Problem

For a minute there, it looked like the AI wars would come down to who built the smartest model. Rob’s not buying that anymore.

Take Claude. Rob’s increasingly convinced that what makes Anthropic so sticky isn’t Claude itself. It’s Claude Code. It’s Cowork. It’s the software wrapped around the model that makes the whole thing so ridiculously useful. Great news for Anthropic, except for one tiny problem: software can be copied. And when the models themselves are interchangeable enough to live in a dropdown menu, you have to start wondering what any of these companies really have that somebody else can’t recreate.

That question leads straight to Microsoft, which may be holding a much better hand than it gets credit for. Everyone else is trying to worm their way into your email, your files, your chats, and the rest of your working life. Microsoft is already sitting inside the castle. From there, Rob and Justin talk through the increasingly strange economics of all this, whether actual humans using your product become the moat that matters, and finally, the proposed fix for our data center problem that involves launching the data centers into space. Give it a listen for Rob’s take on that one, starting with the minor inconvenience of physics.